RAM makes people hypochondriacs. Strictly performance-wise, consensus here is correct - a modern machine can manage RAM/Swap better than a person can keep up. Unix was designed from the microkernel up, to leverage swap space, because it was conceived when 4K or RAM cost the GDP of some countries. Some Unix code won't run at all without a swap partition (in unix/linux, swap space isn't merely a FILE, it's a whole dedicated drive partition.). And, yes, there are limits to what can be accomplished in 8 GB vs. 64 GB RAM, particularly where Adobe is concerned, regardless of how much swap space is available. Moar RAMz beter awlwaze.
There are, however, security benefits to running the fewest necessary apps at one time, and snuffing apps when their tasks are complete. Owing to inevitable sloppiness in hardware and code, memory can leak, allowing lateral movement from one app to another, accidental or intentional. Which leads us to malware specifically designed to scan for, and take possession of, memory address space that contains residual data - which obviously would not be encrypted. If that activity is persistent, your data will get pwned - and persistence is a primary goal of malware creators.
Leaky memory pipelining is also one condition for which certain vintages of CPUs required patches, to compensate for flawed hardware, essentially disabling a significant advantages -- pre-fetch caching of instructions and data. This affects performance regardless of how much RAM the system has, in use or available. Depending on one's operational workflow, this penalty can seem like RAM.
