What's the main advantage of using replicas in Docker Swarm Mode?
What Makes a System Highly Available?
One of the goals of high availability is to eliminate single points of failure in your infrastructure. A single point of failure is a component of your technology stack that would cause a service interruption if it became unavailable.
Let's take your example of a replica that consists of a single instance. Now let's suppose there is a failure. Docker Swarm will notice that the service failed and restart it. The service restarts, but a restart isn't instant. Let's say the restart takes 5 seconds. For those 5 seconds your service is unavailable. Single point of failure.
What if you had a replica that consists of 3 instances. Now when one of them fails (no service is perfect), Docker Swarm will notice that one of the instances is unavailable and create a new one. During that time you still have 2 healthy instances serving requests. To a user of your service, it appears as if there was no down time. This component is no longer a single point of failure.