Friendly ALSA user here :)! I think the Pulse situation is very similar to the one with systemd (they’re even by the same author IIRC). There are some haters,

Friendly ALSA user here :)! I think the Pulse situation is very similar to the one with systemd (they’re even by the same author IIRC). There are some haters, but if you’re a hater-hater than you can just ignore them (eg. GNOME IUUC depends on both Pulse and systemd, and haters of the dependencies who want the DE just have to find their own shims, like Gentoo’s, deal with some error messages (random games and things often give me a lot of audio-related ones, but generally work ok anyway) or just leave for another DE or WM).