Been enjoying Linux for ~25 years, but have never been happy with how it handled low memory situations. Swapping have always killed the system, tho it have improved a little. It's been a while since I've messed with it. I've buckled up and are using more ram now, but afair, you can play with:

(0. reduce running software, and optimize them for less memory, yada yada)

1. use a better OOM (out of memory) manager that activates sooner and more gracefully. Search in your OS' repository for it.
2. use zram as a more intelligent buffer and to remove same (zero) pages. It can lightly compress lesser used memory pages and use a partition backend for storing uncompressible pages. You spend a little cpu, to minimize swap, and when needed, only swap out what can't be compressed.
3. play with all the sysctl vm settings like swappiness and such, but be aware that there's SO much misinformation out there, so seek the official kernel docs. For instance, you can adapt the system to swap more often, but in much smaller chunks, so you avoid spending 5 minutes to hours regaining control - the system may get 'sluggish', but you have control.
4. use cgroups to divide you resources, so firefox/chrome (or compilers/memory-hogs) can only use X amount before their memory have to swap out (if they don't adapt to lower mem conditions automatically). That leaves a system for you that can still react to your input (while ff/chrome would freeze). Not perfect, tho.
5. when gaming, activate a low-system mode, where unnecessary services etc are disabled. I think there's a library/command that helps with that (and raise priority etc), but forgot its name.

EDIT: 6. when NOT gaming, add some of your vram as swap space. Its much faster than your ssd. Search github or your repository for 'vram cache' or something like that. It works via opencl, so everyone with dedicated vram can use it as super fast cache. Perhaps others can remember the name/link ?

Something like that anyway, others will know more about each point.

Also, perhaps ask an AI to create a small interface for you to fiddle with vm settings and cgroups in an automated/permanent way ? just a quick thought. Good luck.

An SSD is a few thousand times slower than ram

What's your ram usage look like? Your system shouldn't need swap unless you are running something very ram intensive