The idea behind Pulseaudio was fine, but the implementation was horrible. Lennart didn't have audio programming experience, and focused heavily on the bluetooth

The idea behind Pulseaudio was fine, but the implementation was horrible. Lennart didn't have audio programming experience, and focused heavily on the bluetooth music streaming use case. Performance-wise it was awful, particularly for games since it took control of all audio. Eventually it got much better, but it still isn't very good at low latency output. Pipewire is a completely new backend written from the ground up keeping interactive use cases in mind. It implements the Pulseaudio API for compatibility, so it can be used as a drop-in replacement, but has its own extensible interface.