> Try turning swap off and really find out if you’re not grateful

Er, I did exactly this over a decade ago and never looked back. It's literally one of the first things I do on a new machine.

> Might be fine if you’re never using all your RAM

That's definitely happened occasionally, and no, swap almost always just makes it worse. The thrashing makes the entire machine unusable instead of making the allocating app(s) potentially unstable. I've recovered most times by just immediately killing the app I'm using. And in fact I have warnings that sometimes tell me fast enough before I reach the limit to avoid such issues in the first place.