Yes, that was the argument I remember reading. You put "system" stuff first, then /home if you did a separate partition for it, etc. Swap last because "hopefully you won't be swapping much anyway".

I also (vaguely) remember some people putting build partitions closer to the front.

I think we're also talking about the days when a machine that was swapping extensively was going to be stupidly slow no matter what you did.

Those days never ended.

I put my swap on a nice NVME drive and...

still avoid hitting that thing at any cost. Memory is pretty quick stuff.