Wow. I’ve just stepped out of the office for a rage break because pipewire shat the bed again. It’s amazing how sound seems to be a solved problem 5 or 10 years ago but now it’s just offal.
Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.
Depending on the output device it’s still using ALSA underneath (e.g. Bluetooth output instead is given to the BT stack), PipeWire is dealing with managing and routing the audio output rather than actually performing it.
I used to have crackling issues with pulseaudio. It needed restarting constantly. Not issue since the switch to pipewire. So my experienced was the absolute opposite of yours.