If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now (whereas, the old scripts had race conditions, were a pain to write and other issues). Anyone who has written both can tell you how much better things are now…
The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…
And honestly, the situation before PulseAudio was awful. Audio not working was a common issue, and low latency audio was the least of anyone’s problems. Whereas, these days, because of Pulseaudio, even gaming is a thing now (back then, I even saw issues on tuxracer, and Unreal tournament back in the days).
In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.
I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us). In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)