On top of that PulseAudio appeared to be quite buggy at the beginning for quite some amount time, even after distributions started defaulting to it. I have read

On top of that PulseAudio appeared to be quite buggy at the beginning for quite some amount time, even after distributions started defaulting to it. I have read that most of those issues were actually driver bugs but that did not stop it getting a bad reputation. I think this bad reputation is also part of the reason why the hate on systemd escalated that much.