[gf000]

So one audio server managed to provide a shim for another audio server, great.

But it absolutely doesn't follow from that that pulseaudio was somehow bad. There was more than a decade where audio drivers were slowly getting bug fixes to get to a state where they are working okay for the most part. Pipewire would have experienced many of the same issues as pulseaudio, and we would similarly attribute those errors incorrectly to the audio server.

[Izkata]

My laptop would regularly freeze and need a hard reboot, and I never could figure out why. One day for a completely unrelated reason I decided to try switching from pulseaudio to pipewire, with no other changes (including no other upgrades; I'm lazy and like stability), and months later I realized it hadn't frozen at all. Still hasn't, years later. The problem was definitely pulseaudio making the whole system unstable, not just causing audio issues.