I've rarely actually experienced this (even on HDD based machines). Sometimes the system will chug if a runaway JavaScript somewhere leaks all available memory, but I can usually switch (slowly) to a terminal, kill the offending process, and after a minute or two things will sort themselves out and be fast again. I suspect Ubuntu and them may have pathological kernel VMM and swap settings out of the box.

Lately I've been running with "swappiness" turned way down, but not with completely disabled swap. Eh, I've got 32 GiB of RAM now, my system can handle a few programs in memory -- even a couple of Electron ones.