Honestly good question because if you asked that 2 months ago I would just flat out say yes: ZRAM is always better than plain file or disk partition swap.
Now, I would say it depends. If you have slow storage, like HDD or older SSDs, then yes it’s almost always better in every situation.
But if you have NVMe storage, realistically using NVMe backed swap (Hynix Platinum) I don’t notice any slowdowns in the least. However, on paper zram is still more efficient.
The problem is, if you are genuinely in need of a ram upgrade that is 1.5 to 2x current ram installed I would say swap space to NVMe works great because I hit a bug when using 50% of ram for zram where by the computer would freeze when trying to resume from sleep. I found the changes needed to solve that as it had something to do with the timing of the compression. But unless you have HDD or slow SSD I would say it’s best to just go with regular swap space until physical RAM upgrade.
That said, zswap can be a smart middle ground. It compresses pages in RAM before they hit your swap device, reducing writes and improving latency. Unlike zram, it doesn’t require a fixed RAM allocation and still uses your swap file or partition if needed. If you’re running into zram issues or want a flexible setup, zswap can quietly improve performance without the quirks of pre allocating blocks of your memory.