And OpenBSD introduced its own userspace daemon for mixing multiple audio streams together. The by-then already existing libsndio would then just default to opening the socket provided by that daemon. So, the change was transparent to applications (no code changes, they already used libsndio) and users (no configuration, at least for people running defaults) and didn't cause years of grief, agony, churn, hatred, and shitstorm.

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