I can second that. I'm by no means a fan of PulseAudio, I got bitten by it many times in the past, but my experience with Windows and audio over HDMI has been at least as bad. Even with a fully updated Windows 10 and a bog-standard on-board audio chip, Windows consistently messes up my speaker configuration or randomly mutes the audio. Particularly after updates it regularly forgets that I have a 5.1 receiver hooked up over HDMI and defaults back to stereo, and I have to re-configure it again.