Pipewire is a refinement of the idea, many of these lessons are hard won by pulseaudio itself, being used for years.
Linux audio before pulseaudio was just a lot worse, for many people pulseaudio meant not having to think about how audio worked any more.
Pulseaudio saved my bacon just the other day with virtualization - since the server runs on OSX I could pipe all the audio devices from an OSX host to a Linux guest.
Pipewire is a refinement of the idea, many of these lessons are hard won by pulseaudio itself, being used for years.
Linux audio before pulseaudio was just a lot worse, for many people pulseaudio meant not having to think about how audio worked any more.
Pulseaudio saved my bacon just the other day with virtualization - since the server runs on OSX I could pipe all the audio devices from an OSX host to a Linux guest.