I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.

uugh! overcooked pasta

If you had this much buffer memory what are the reasons to have swap space as well?

Many programs do stuff once during startup that they never do again, sometimes creating redundant data objects that will never get accessed in the configuration its being run in. Eventually the kernel memory manager figures out that some pages are never used but it can’t just delete them. If swap is enabled it can swap them to disk instead. It frees up that RAM for something more important. It’s usually minor but every few MB helps.