Did you ever used Pulseaudio. Some years ago sound was not working at all, the only way to make it work was to kill pulseaudiod and stick with ALSA. Now it started working and is being replaced. No comment.
Pulse was a long time ago. I think it was a bad idea to not cover low latency, but it's not Lennart's fault if distros shipped it too soon. It works fine now, and was a lot nicer than raw ALSA at the time. But Pipewire is definitely an upgrade.