Swapping (or, rather, paging – I don't think there is an operating system in existence today that swaps out entire processes) does not make modern systems slower – it is a delusion and an urban legend that originated in the sewers of the intertubes and is based on an uninformed opinion rather than the understanding and knowledge of how virtual memory systems work. It has been regurgitated to death, and the article explains it really well why it is a delusion.

20-30 years ago, heavy paging often crippled consumer Intel based PC's[0] because paging went to slow mechanical hard disks on PATA/IDE, a parallel device bus (until 2005 circa), which had little parallelism and initially no native command queuing; SCSI drives did offer features such as tagged command queuing and efficient scatter-gather but were uncommon on desktops leave alone laptops. Today the bottlenecks are largely gone – abundant RAM, switched interconnects such as PCIe, SATA with NCQ/AHCI, and solid-state storage, especially NVMe, provide low-latency, highly parallel I/O – so paging still signals memory pressure yet is far less punishing on modern laptops and desktops.

Swap space today has a quieter benefit: lower energy use. On systems with LPDDR4/LPDDR5, the memory controller can place inactive banks into low-power or deep power-down states; by compressing memory and paging out cold, dirty pages to swap, the OS reduces the number of banks that must stay active, cutting DRAM refresh and background power. macOS on Apple Silicon is notably aggressive with memory compression and swap and works closely with the SoC power manager, which can contribute to the strong battery life of Apple laptops compared with competitors, albeit this is only one factor amongst several.

[0] RISC workstations and servers have had switched interconnects since day 1.

[dead]