...which is crucial since you don't want to lose your data when closing the lid. (Non-tech-term is on purpose here, since users shouldn't need to know about the difference. Also I believe OSX uses a hybrid approach).
According to a comment in the post it fails when the swap partition is encrypted. However why enable swap with 16 GB of RAM? I've been running without swap for almost 3 years and never had any trouble. If I start approaching the limit I'll buy another 16 GB.
Exactly, the comment in your blog is "suspension to disk does not work if your swap partition is encrypted. This is due to how Ubuntu encrypts your home (ecryptfs) but not due to Linux itself."
I've had Linux on mobile for ages and have yet to have reliable sleep/wake behavior on a dozen machines over the years.
Sleep on Linux works reliably if you run it inside a Mac VM though, FWIW! ;)