Conversely, in my own experience, Pipewire removed everything I held dear, destroyed my will to compute, and has somehow crippled my systems for the purposes of multitasking with any type of media playing.

Hyperbole aside, I'm glad someone was looking at the audio situation, but this one seemed to knock me out of the game on every machine that received it. Examples of common scenarios for me: I can't have firefox open and virtualbox at the same time, or bitwig and firefox, or visual studio and audacious. Common pairs of apps cause a bitrate mismatch for whatever reason, and everything sounds like a heavily bitcrushed and ring modulated signal.

The exception to this are machines that were installed with pipewire, rather than upgraded to pipewire. Also, using Cadence, a router type app helps, but inconsistently.