I think the key here is what you mean by using swap. Having a lot of data swapped out is not bad in and of itself - if the machine genuinely isn't using those pages much, then now you have more space available for everything else.

What's bad is a high frequency of moving pages in and out of swap. This is something that can cause your machine to be functionally unavailable. But it is important to note that you can easily trigger somewhat-similar behaviour even with swap disabled, per my previous comment. I've seen machines without swap go functionally unavailable for > 10 minutes when they get low on RAM - with the primary issue being that they were grinding on disk reloading dropped executable pages.

I agree that in low memory situations killing off something ASAP is often the best approach, my main point here is that relying on the Linux OOM killer is not a good way to kill something off ASAP. It kills things off as a last resort after trashing your machine's performance - userspace OOM killers in concert with swap typically give a much better availability profile.