Problems with recursive random play of large number of photos/videos

What are the cons of enabling swap, does it reduce SD card life and the corruption probability is higher? If the issue is with memory needed for media file metadata, why would it take so long for the application to crash, wouldn’t it show up right away? Memory usage seems to be okay, as seen from the ‘free -mh’ command, even on the Pi 3A+, at least initially. Playling Playlist dies after about 7 minutes - possible memory leak? - #16 by sam_nazarko - this was the other thread with a similar issue in which I had posted earlier, lot of experimentation that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere!