Rather, Gnome stopped supporting ALSA directly around 2007, and Firefox did the same in 2017. Yes, you could use alternatives like JACK or sndio. The point was

Rather, Gnome stopped supporting ALSA directly around 2007, and Firefox did the same in 2017. Yes, you could use alternatives like JACK or sndio. The point was that a new Gnome broke the reliance on ALSA, as a user, you had to migrate off ALSA which you likely had used for a decade before. Naturally, most users migrated to the best-supported option, the distro's default, which was Pulse Audio both on Fedora and Debian.