Comment by ahartmetz

For most of the (sadly not shorter) life of PulseAudio, ALSA was more reliable, but at some point, Firefox got a new audio backend that straight up dropped support for ALSA, and a few games started crashing with backtraces indicating audio trouble when not run with PulseAudio. I've had to deal with PulseAudio's dropouts under load, latencies and lockups for 2-3 years before PipeWire became a viable replacement.