Yeah it works surprisingly well. I installed Gentoo on a 2005 era laptop a few years ago and had to keep adding zswap until Rust could compile for Firefox. Iirc it took about 12G of zswap to get it working, but it wasn’t too bad overall.

Bugs are inevitable. There are 80,000 active bugs in the Debian tracker, with the main repositories having over 30,000 packages. This just means that all of the most serious blocker/showstopper bugs have been resolved, which in itself is an important accomplishment.