It does work that way. I had a small, very lightly loaded VPS that had no swap. Occasionally, it would not start all its services on boot, in particular the db

It does work that way. I had a small, very lightly loaded VPS that had no swap. Occasionally, it would not start all its services on boot, in particular the db, due to OOM. Adding a small amount of swap allowed it to boot cleanly. The swap was not subsequently used. The alternative was to upgrade the server RAM at double the monthly cost.