In terms of performance, you actually don't want to avoid swapping, you want your OS to be smart about swapping. Some type of swap space is probably always beneficial unless you have more RAM than storage lol. Swap is great for putting aside data that isn't needed but can't be freed, and prioritizing filesystem cache over some background service that isn't doing anything. Even big servers often use some form of swap because swap can reduce disk reading. In some cases swap can even reduce disk writing, as counter intuitive as that sounds.

Yea both zRAM and Zswap use good compression, typically around 3:1 ratio, and it's still light on CPU usage, much faster than SSD swap.

That's not how it works but yes, if you don't need to swap, then that is better. Avoiding swapping though is also the wrong angle as depending on amount of ram, swapping can be beneficial, it just depends.

To me the compression sounds like it would increase RAM (virtually speaking), without hitting performance too much. Otherwise it would use the SSD and io is generally much slower than RAM operations (and compression, decompression in memory only if its fast like this one). When I understand the benefit correctly.