Agreed about the swap partition but Debian has supported sudo out of the box for many years, the UI is just unintuitive. If you leave the root password empty the Debian installer will install sudo for you.
That's a heck of a gotcha.
However, even the text itself is worded to leave out the sudo implication to the end of the whole paragraph, which is typically skipped by anyone who simply wants their OS installed.
edit: If, after installing, you install sudo and manually disable the root password, you won't be able to boot to the rescue or emergency targets; a valid root password is now required by default.
If you want them to work without a password, like classic "single-user mode", you can edit both the rescue and emergency unit files, and add the --force flag to sulogin.
https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/user-setup/blob/70b7...