I think this is the main point you are missing. There is never too much RAM to use swap. The kernel will always take advantage of swap. You don’t have to be using a lot of RAM to be in a position where the kernel can benefit from using swap.
Also, some applications attempt to map memory directly to swap and perform badly or break if they cannot–see this person’s experience for example: Swap or not? - #33 by cjbottaro You can argue that these applications should be written better, but are you trying to set up a system that can only run applications which have been coded to map memory a specific way?
You can announce that reference material explaining how the kernel uses swap is “quaint” or “outdated”, but that doesn’t change anything about how the kernel manages memory use. You may as well call the kernel itself quaint and outdated.
In my opinion, the original advice (which is “have some amount of swap”) is correct. The comments suggesting otherwise–regardless of how emphatically the suggestions are expressed–are missing some crucial facts.