I think the main reason for the sudden uptick in Pipewire usage is that due to the pandemic a lot more people were doing daily video meetings with screen sharin

I think the main reason for the sudden uptick in Pipewire usage is that due to the pandemic a lot more people were doing daily video meetings with screen sharing. And for all people that have migrated to Wayland, this was a major source of pain. With pipewire, this works quite nicely, including for applications that are sandboxed (e.g. Jitsi in a Flatpak). In my bubble, when people talked about using Pipewire, it was almost exclusively related to screensharing on Wayland. I've switched from Pulseaudio to Pulseaudio-on-Pipewire last year and haven't looked back. Next step would be trying to set an audio processing pipeline with audio effects (like a multiband equalizer tuned to my headphones), something that I managed to set up with Jack before using Pipewire, but that was always a pain.