That's a weird comparison. The first time I heard about pipewire it replaced both pa and Jack for me without sacrificing anything and actually improved everything. And that was before it was picked up by distros. Wayland on the other hand is widely deployed and I still can't always use it for basic use cases like screen sharing.

I'd argue pipewire is a much smaller scope and has had better collaboration from everyone involved. You got in when the distros quite reasonably made the switch on your behalf and it was not an especially difficult call for them. Wayland has a bit more baggage, bad actors in the video hardware/driver territory, etc.

Distros are facing a way harder decision on Wayland to make on your behalf, especially as Wayland starts to support some use cases fully while still not hitting others.

systemd then :)

but such comparisons will always have shortcomings.

For what it's worth, screensharing works fine for me. I use it with Zoom and Mattermost (webrtc). Are you on an old version? I'm on 1.18 I think (Debian 11)

Screen-recording is still a bit cringe. The builtin Gnome tool is OK, but a bit clunky. I miss Kazam.

Does pipewire still do software rendering at the app server (because no GPU) and then run a video codec to ship whole frames to the desktop?

Nah, bro. We're modern.

I think I had it confused with waypipe.