Agreed, but it means I still don't run into an OOM condition abruptly since the swap is there. It turns out modern disks are pretty fast, so the system freezes

Agreed, but it means I still don't run into an OOM condition abruptly since the swap is there. It turns out modern disks are pretty fast, so the system freezes for a bit as physical memory is exhausted. Then I usually stop some of what I am doing and it goes back to normal.