Also had issues with bluetooth, as you seem to have. I will permit the idea that this is possibly unrelated (bluez is garbage, yes), but bluetooth audio was working for me previously, and only broke when pulse entered the picture.
FWIW from an API perspective I still think OSS seems better than ALSA... Linux audio seems to be a repeated case of people confusing interface with implementation, and the interface only ever gets more complex.
Of course you can still trivially disable the daemon and you lose software mixing & resampling, but things that work within these limits will run ok. But there really shouldn't ever be need to disable it, it just works.
The sndio api is pretty damn nice & simple too. https://man.openbsd.org/sio_open.3
Don't get me wrong. For years, ALSA was a pain. But in the last 10 years, ALSA has always "just worked" for me. I think the only time I had to fiddle with ALSA in the last decade was to get the mic on a headset to work.
I use Slackware, which tends to be more conservative about these things; the fact that PA is now the default in Slackware is a good indicator of PA having overcome its growing pains.
Additionally, I somewhat doubt BlueZ would've made PA such a hard dependency if they weren't reasonably sure that it's stable enough for primetime.