Must depend on use case, but I prefer program that is planning to use swap (usually one where I accidentally allocate a way too big buffer) to fail automatically, rather than having to try to use the now unresponsive system UI to kill it

You are right, it depends. While building firefox from sources system needs several gigs of RAM. At the same time normal functioning of my system does not need more that 4Gb. And a couple of years I used swap just for such big /usr/bin/ld processes. Now I have 8Gb of RAM and linking FF or LibreOffice is not an issue anymore.

I remember when it became impossible to build Firefox on our lab machines with 1GB of RAM and 2GB of swap. Even before that it took literally all day to build.

I got another taste of that lately when I had to build Wireshark from source on a Raspberry Pi model B thanks to broken packages in the repo. At least it was the version with 512MB of memory and overclocked. For the most part Wireshark isn't that bad to build, certainly better than Firefox, but there are a couple of dissectors that have unreasonably large source files.

it never works for me on windows

it just slows my system down to a crawl, requiring me to force a reboot

it probably depends on your hardware

and if i disable the pagefile, windows update stops working and at 75% memory usage it starts panicing and closing programs

With an SSD it only slows down my system enough that I know I need to free up some memory.

But it allows me to save, exit a program, or close a tab, without losing any work.