You likely had much more ram than the average person did, right? My understanding was XP was based around the needs of the average consumer and wrote the OS in such a way as to almost mandate swapping rather than writing something smarter that could avoid swapping if the machine had more than enough ram.

Because that swapping would occur regardless, there would be a performance penalty when you didn't actually need it. Pointing the swap back to ram circumvented that.

I wouldn't say it's a crutch as there are still plenty of users machines and situations where ram might run out, so swapping is better than the apps crashing. But yes it's becoming increasingly obsolete.