Yes, not maintaining currently working code is less maintenance load. Obviously. Replacing it with new code in some random new incomplete daemon. GNOME until s

Yes, not maintaining currently working code is less maintenance load. Obviously. Replacing it with new code in some random new incomplete daemon. GNOME until some later v3 (check, likely 3.4) didn't rely on systemd, there were supported sane replacements for e.g. account management. The other sound servers have a long history, starting with ancient esound (eh) through Alsa dmix and devices (gnome 2 had a configuration app even), Arts for KDE, JACK and a few less notable. GNOME used to properly support everything gstreamer did, which is a lot. It's not about maintainers nor reduced load. It's about RedHat being the maintainers and GNOME being junk since. Hence all the GNOME 2 updates, like Cinnamon and MATE. Distro maintainers unfortunately have to support GNOME 3 too as it's not unpopular, and then they'd have to support two versions of udev and init system and potentially write dbus shims like Gentoo does. It's quite some work. Work RedHat (esp. Pottering) forced onto others. Like work they forced into ALSA devs to make compatibility shims for non-mmap cards because certain PulseAudio did not care to use full ALSA API and required rewinding, instead of handling it like say JACK or Arts. This also prevents it from running properly on top of dmix. It really wants direct hardware, making your "on ALSA" point moot. Even JACK can run on it but it's not good for latency. It's a pattern. Lazy RedHat devs integrating things because it's easier for them without any consideration of others. Because they can. Dropping GNOME 3 is an extremely tough decision for big distributions, mostly not possible.