Yeah, same; I can't help but think there is a vocal minority in these threads that thinks Pulse is broken.
I use Pulse for some pretty complicated stuff, too; I'll pipe individual streams to my speakers, if I want to show something to my SO (e.g., a reddit video) but want to keep, like, my music or my backgrounded game on the headset. I can do that with PA, and honestly pretty easily. AFAIK, no other system supports that, though admittedly I haven't used Windows in some time.
Far more complicated, I also have TTS bot I use in Discord sometimes, when I can't speak. PA allows me to push that into Discord; this is another thing I don't even begin to know how to set up on other systems. (The bot emits sound, so it's like a program playing sound, not a recording device. Discord thus doesn't recognize it as such. So I end up creating a fake input device, of sorts, and wiring the bot's output to that fake output (so it goes to Discord) but also to my own headset, so I can also hear the bot, as the TTS is far from perfect and will sometimes just make hilarious garbage of words.)
I also use Bluetooth, and that usually works. It certainly works more reliably with PA on Linux than it does w/ macOS, though it is my no means flawless. But that seems to be how bluetooth is: it sucks on every OS. There will be days it won't connect to Linux, and there will be days it won't connect to macOS.
I will say that Pipewire looks like it more solidly hits the nail: the thing I don't like is that PA doesn't really model audio as a graph of nodes. (PA's model is equivalent to a graph of nodes, but that it isn't just a graph of nodes makes it a lot harder to deal with and intuit.) For that reason I'm excited about Pipewire; I need to try it one of these days. PA would also be served by a better API; it is difficult to script against.
Also, systemd units are hands-down a more solidly engineered thing than the mess of shell scripts they replaced. I will take systemd+journald any. day. of. the. week. People that … want shell back — I honestly can't comprehend this. I've literally not had to deal for years now with a service wedging itself in because some daemon orphaned itself somehow between some unreliable mess of shell, pidfiles, and other hacks. Is systemd/journald perfect? No, I've spent time fighting it too. But it's a lot more productive than what came before, and the design is engineered to solve the problem at hand… which the shell mess was not.