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Actually no there are other reasons. Meta oomd requires you to have swap enabled, which makes it a non-starter for us. systemd-oomd has its own set of drawbacks. We evaluated all options at length and earlyoom came out as the clear winner for our usecase.

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Why weren't you using swap?

I'm not the parent. But in the last 5 or 8 years, Linux swap has mostly been useless to me. I run a desktop with 16GB ram, have swappiness set to 0, and even when using maybe 5GB or 7GB for running programs, it wants to swap out all kinds of stuff. When I switch to another running program I have to wait for it to get taken out of swap. But I was using that running program just a while ago, why do I have to wait?

And it doesn't help in thrashing in Linux, it does it anyway.

In defence of swap: common misconceptions[0]

[0] https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

No misconceptions here ;)

Still the question is open, what does swap do for me in 2023? I only see disadvantages.

For our usecase (Ceph), if one server starts swapping, it completely kills the entire cluster performance. Killing the service (with earlyoom) is preferable in most circumstances.

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