If PulseAudio, Wayland, etc are all some of the worst software then how does it keep ending up in distros like Debian? If there are better alternatives why would they willingly adopt it?
Part of the reason PulseAudio got a bad rap is because of bad audio drivers (and sometimes bad hardware), because they refused to work around those bugs at the "wrong" layer of the stack.
After a few painful years though, the bugs got fixed in the "right" places, and that's part of why Pipewire (also developed by Red Hat) was able to come along and replace it so quickly.
And thankfully Pipewire addresses a lot of the actually legitimate issues with PulseAudio
