Imo it was still an overloud minority with problems. Online complaining was totally single-issue, with few of these agents able to also sing the virtues, which were many & immense. Pavucontrol was and is unparralelled in the world. Last, the bitterness never quelled. There's still a vocal minority of Pylse haters. But they now know they'll get shut down & taken to the cleaner. It's also well known that Pulse wasnt even to blame for a vast vast number of the issues- device driver bugs had to be filed & the kernel had to actually start working as advertised. Yes it's a hard experience having tbings not work. But to enforce strict conservatism, to be so resistant & dissentful of progress: it's treasonous what these people do, it's treasonous to so lopsidedly spread only the bad, so loudly & peristently. Even when it was a problem. That it has taken well over a decade of enduring the griefing, that's ignoble & unconscionable.
I think there definitely is some tugging towards perfection that has to happen, sure. Some of it is users lives getting better. But I also think there's a huge resistance to change rooted in the human heart, & some people will drag us all down for a vrry long time over anything that doesnt meet their bias, anything remotely uncomfortable, they'll refuse to see good, or they just have negative biases anyways, have already drank enough of the haterade, become witting or unwitting parts of the shouting class mob.
This reads like someone who wasn't around for the pulseaudio switch. I remember when it was first introduced to Ubuntu: It was actually bad and the complaints were warranted. Audio lag and drops (over wired headphones and speakers of all things, not bluetooth like might be expected), where the only fix available was to switch back to just alsa. Over the following few Ubuntu releases it steadily became more stable and actually useable, hence why the complaints disappeared - there no longer was anything to complain about.
If systemd is also reaching a turning point, it's because either the developers or distro maintainers are finally listening to users. For example, on Ubuntu, the default for KillUserProcesses is now "no", so screen/tmux/etc won't get killed on logout. This was one of the major complaints with systemd for a long time, the developers changing decades-old conventions and pushing it onto everyone, then saying those programs had to change to work with systemd. What's happened instead is systemd is being made to adapt to those conventions, so complaints are slowly going away.