Kinda, basically. Swap is a cost optimization for "bad" programs.

Having more RAM is always better performance, but swap allows you to skimp out on RAM in certain cases for almost identical performance but lower cost (of buying more RAM), if you run programs that allocate a lot of memory that it subsequently doesn't use. I hear Java is notoriously bad at this, so if you run a lot of heavy enterprise Java software, swap can get you the same performance with half the RAM.

(It is also a "GC strategy", or stopgap for memory leaks. Rather than managing memory, you "could" just never free memory, and allocate a fat blob of swap and let the kernel swap it out.)