If I were an average consumer, I would care much more about my device being secure, than having real time audio.
It's not even a choice between better security and real-time audio, since the average consumer doesn't even know about that unless specifically called out by marketing. For phones it's about what looks better, both physically and digitally. It's about how the emojis look, how good the pictures the camera takes look (or how good you're told they look), and how responsive and smooth the screen movements are.
The average consumer goes off what they can immediately see and what they're told by marketing, and by what they feel social pressure to buy. The discerning technical expert goes off marketing (but a different set of claims), and a bit more of a discerning eye, and while far more knowledgeable than the average consumer, is still mostly driven by hearsay.
The number of people with enough knowledge to actually make a real data driven choice is probably much less than 0.0001% of people, and that's far from average. I'm not one of them, but I can look at the systems often affected, make some assumptions about how many people know enough about them to speak usefully on risks they actually have, and do some napkin statistics to know almost nobody else is either, even here.
It's easy to call out the average consumer, but truthfully, the last time you bought a phone or computer, how deeply did you analyze the actual security considerations to do with the different aspects of the system, and how much did you rely on what some site told you, trusted recommendations, what you already preferred, and your hunch was which was better? How many millions of lines of code are involved in these systems now? How could you, or any of us actually do anything other than that?
If you were, you would behave like one, i.e. not care that much (if at all) about security. What you are saying is "I do care about my device being secure".
Perhaps, the average person would be more upset/notice if they were negatively impacted as the result of a security issue, than if some feature, e.g. real time audio were missing, which I'm sure no one would even notice.
If you're system gets p0wned there is hardly any audio to play.
macOS, iOS and Windows security improvements, while being the musicians choice for real time audio, show it is possible to put security first, while offering a good audio stack.
Linux distributions make up the majority of public web and database servers and approximately none of the real-time audio players, is that not a “particular reason” to prioritise security over real-time audio?
The fact you use the word "prioritize security" is indeed telling. Security is just one aspect of a system. There is no particular reason for Linux to prioritize it above everything else, no matter what twitter infosec drama queens believe.
Obviously the fact that infosec people are quite often insufferable does not help their case.