If we're lucky, it will take them ages to polish this turd, so effectively you're still good "just" using pulse. Which also broke on my laptop after the last dist-upgrade, and after half an hour of debugging and fiddling I gave up. Found "apulse" which is a small library you can LD_PRELOAD that implements the pulse api but simply translates everything to ALSA. Doesn't support the more advanced stuff from pulse obviously, but works for normal things like Firefox etc.