There are a few reasons they split off home and root. It makes recovery simpler, and allows you to share the partition between multiple environments - which is useful if you dual boot.
I personally rarely make a second partition for home, but I always make a separate partition for /boot. GRUB requires an separate EFI partition to install (which is kind of dumb), and if you decide to encrypt your disk, the boot directory cannot be encrypted.
I think the reason they put swap in these tutorials is that many times people install linux on low-powered machines that require the swap because of limited memory. It's not a requirement to install linux, though. I never run it on installation.
I personally rarely make a second partition for home, but I always make a separate partition for /boot. GRUB requires an separate EFI partition to install (which is kind of dumb), and if you decide to encrypt your disk, the boot directory cannot be encrypted.
I think the reason they put swap in these tutorials is that many times people install linux on low-powered machines that require the swap because of limited memory. It's not a requirement to install linux, though. I never run it on installation.