In my humble experience, if you run out of memory in Linux you are f... up, irrespective of swap present and/or OOM getting in.

On the other side, a Raspberry Pi freezed unexpectedly (not due to low memory) until a very small swap file was enabled. It was almost never used but the freezes stopped. Fun swap stories.

>There's also a lot of misunderstanding about the purpose of swap – many people just see it as a kind of "slow extra memory" for use in emergencies, but don't understand how it can contribute during normal load to the healthy operation of an operating system as a whole.

That's the long-standing defect that needs to be corrected then, there should be no dependence on swap existing whatsoever as long as you have more than enough memory for the entire workload.