Ann, that amount of free memory, 2.29 (8 - 5.71) is actually very good. The macOS is very good at memory utilization, so what is key is the "pressure" and not the absolute memory used. You didn't say what Adobe products you uninstalled, nor what you had running when the swapping occurred, but I would bet that if you were editing images, or video that is where the swap happened. And once swap gets used, I don't think it gets returned until the system is rebooted. It may not be used, but it is allocated. So, if 1.49GB was the max ever used for swap, it could have been there because you edited a photoshop file, let's say something middling size, 50MB. Photoshop keeps versions, up to 12, so you can "undo" your edits if you don't like them, so if you did that dozen or more edits, you now have 600MB of stuff to keep, which PS tries to keep in memory, but will eventually run out of space and swapping will kick in. Do that 3-4 times, or have 3-4 of these middling files open at the same time and there you have the 1.49GB of swap. It's easy to do with big files and deep history stacks. For the "average" user 8GB is just fine, but if you routinely edit PS files, or videos (rendering takes a TON of memory), then your next machine you may want to get more RAM. All that said, these days with SSDs instead of rotating drives, the penalty for swap is much less, as the saving and retrieval of the swapped out data is much faster. Right now my swap happens to be zero, but if I launch Parallels and fire up Win10, as I do occasionally, that will change.
So, bottom line, with an SSD swapping is not that super critical, but memory pressure is.
One final thought: It's ok to use all of the memory. That means you are getting the maximum performance out of your Mac. If you have free memory, you could be doing more than you are. So don't sweat the numbers, look at the pressure.