With swap, it's less like a brick wall and more like one of those emergency sand traps you sometimes see at the end of long downhill roads: going into it slows you gradually to a halt and prevents a hard crash.

The point is, a heavily swapping machine lets you do something about the problem; sometimes, there's nothing you can do that wouldn't have been done for you by the OOM killer if there were no swap -- but at least, with lots of swap around, you get the choice. (Stopping the feed that's overwhelming your database, without having to kill the database server program, that sort of thing.)

Peter