Swap-space Memes

Someone just discovered they have 500GB of free disk space while their 8GB RAM is crying for mercy every time Chrome opens a new tab. The logic is flawless, really. Why bother with volatile memory that forgets everything when you lose power, when you could just dump all your runtime data onto the filesystem and pretend it's the same thing? Sure, your application would run at the blistering speed of molasses in January, but at least you'd never run out of "memory" again. Who needs nanosecond access times when you can have millisecond disk I/O? It's basically the same thing if you squint hard enough and ignore several decades of computer science. Fun fact: This is essentially what swap space does, except the OS is smart enough to know it's a terrible idea and only does it when absolutely desperate. But hey, why let the operating system have all the fun?