To be fair, pulseaudio did expose bugs in alsa-drivers, so a "known good" configuration could stop working when "upgraded" to use PA.
I have my share of reservations about systemd (and PA), but thought that it might be worth pointing out that "known good" hardware A with software X, doesn't have to mean hardware A is all good, just that A has no bugs/errors not exposed when running X. So Y comes along (new kernel, drivers?) with entirely new code - and suddenly things behave erratically.
Yes there were other mentions of it with notes to it being fixed in a later systemd drop, which we can't deploy because RH/CentOS don't ship it. I think one of our guys raised a case with RH but I was dragged off onto something else then.