Contemporary world of various DOS extenders is completely different ball game to the extent that typical DOS extender was more complete operating system implementation than what classic MacOS ever hoped for.

By contrast, I remember people putting swap files (most prominently the Win386 one) into straight RAMDISKs, which should really just give you a net negative effect all across the board.

Many low footprint Linux installations now include swapping to zram, which is compressed. The net effect is positive since you usually have an abundance of spare CPU cycles.

I played doom II with 4MB on a 386DX40. We had a DOS 6 boot menu to not load smartdrv. It ran good enough, except on the last level, where all the different enemy types caused all their graphics to be loaded at the same time. That was too much, and caused severe disk trashing (not swapping, DOOM managed the disk on its own).

doom used less memory, so it should have been good enough.