I've run into a similar issue, where the default output device wouldn't be selected, when I used PulseAudio by itself before Pipewire was a thing. I had to use

I've run into a similar issue, where the default output device wouldn't be selected, when I used PulseAudio by itself before Pipewire was a thing. I had to use one of the PA console mixers to set my default output and input devices, and with some playing around with it, I was able to make them the default. Might help to use pactl or one of the many PA mixers to poke around and see if there's anything you can adjust to fix the issue. Might also help to test out pipewire-media-session to see if that helps, too.