> As long as the space comes back when you need it, you don't have to care.
That's a common assumption but it's also a lie: because you do have to care about wearing your media, reducing its lifespan. Abusing storage with heavy doses of r/w activity (which is what swapping does) is not good. Yes, the issue is not as bad in modern "disks" as in rust-spinners, and can often look like a matter of efficiency (because of how memory is physically "flipped", on modern drives it's more efficient to write a ton of data rather than a few bytes), but in reality you are wearing your disk more than you would if macOS kept its grubby hands to itself.
Of course this is not a downside for the people who will sell you replacement disks, or rather replacement machines (since drives are now soldered), who coincidentally happen to be the people who develop the disk-wearing OS.
That's a common assumption but it's also a lie: because you do have to care about wearing your media, reducing its lifespan. Abusing storage with heavy doses of r/w activity (which is what swapping does) is not good. Yes, the issue is not as bad in modern "disks" as in rust-spinners, and can often look like a matter of efficiency (because of how memory is physically "flipped", on modern drives it's more efficient to write a ton of data rather than a few bytes), but in reality you are wearing your disk more than you would if macOS kept its grubby hands to itself.
Of course this is not a downside for the people who will sell you replacement disks, or rather replacement machines (since drives are now soldered), who coincidentally happen to be the people who develop the disk-wearing OS.