> This is not about belief, but lived experience.

I mean, I manage some servers, and this is my experience.

> Setting up swap to me is a choice between a unresponsive system (with swap) or a responsive system with a few oom kills or downed system.

Sorry, but are you sure that you budgeted your system requirements correctly? A Linux system shall neither fill SWAP nor trigger OOM regularly.

Swap also works really well for desktop workloads. (I guess that's why Apple uses it so heavily on their Macbooks etc.)

With a good amount of swap, you don't have to worry about closing programs. As long as your 'working set' stays smaller than your RAM, your computer stays fast and responsive, regardless of what's open and idling in the background.

Yes, this is my experience, too. However, I still tend to observe my memory usage even if I have plenty of free RAM.

Old habits die hard, but I'm not complaining about this one. :)

It doesn’t happen often, and I have a multi user system with unpredictable workloads. It’s also not about swap filling up, but giving the pretense the system is operable in a memory exhausted state which means oom killer doesn’t run, but the system is unresponsive and never recovers.

Without swap oom killer runs and things become responsive.