This is not about belief, but lived experience. Setting up swap to me is a choice between a unresponsive system (with swap) or a responsive system with a few oom kills or downed system.
Swap also works really well for desktop workloads. (I guess that's why Apple uses it so heavily on their Macbooks etc.)
With a good amount of swap, you don't have to worry about closing programs. As long as your 'working set' stays smaller than your RAM, your computer stays fast and responsive, regardless of what's open and idling in the background.
It doesn’t happen often, and I have a multi user system with unpredictable workloads. It’s also not about swap filling up, but giving the pretense the system is operable in a memory exhausted state which means oom killer doesn’t run, but the system is unresponsive and never recovers.
Without swap oom killer runs and things become responsive.
This is not about belief, but lived experience. Setting up swap to me is a choice between a unresponsive system (with swap) or a responsive system with a few oom kills or downed system.