Comment by ahartmetz

PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer).

ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.