I can't agree, ever since jack2 I actually never had any problem getting it to work with pulse. You may be thinking of jack1. Pipewire does make it easier to do this though.
PipeWire handles ALSA much, much better than jack ever did on any of my machines. Oh, and handling audio permissions via Unix groups made me want to rm -rf /
I don't know about alsa, I don't remember what happened when I tried that years ago. Yeah Unix permissions is bad, Pipewire is definitely better there. The security is a big improvement but I also wouldn't say that's anything revolutionary.