The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.
Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi-window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.
Depending on PulseAudio is fine now. The amount of people not running PA is negligible. If you don't want to do that, use an intermediary API like SDL or PortAudio.
I was wondering if EA and the other gaming companies had designated a particular configuration as "the" supported Linux configuration.
I think Valve has done most of the legwork with their SteamOS which is based on Debian, but I don't know what libraries or frameworks they're providing as a standard baseline.
On the other hand, there just might not be a viable Linux gaming market.
It simply isn't worth it when the percentage of players that are using Desktop Linux to play PC games is ~1% of the player base.
While less than ideal, the status quo is nothing to lament. It is so much to ask for these publishers not to go out of their way to sabotage it?
If you want to play the game you should be running it on a supported operating system. If the software doesn't work (which is what is really happening here) with an unsupported configuration then that is on you not EA.
Also buying games that aren't supported on your OS and jumping through the hoops is just telling companies like EA that they will get the Linux sales because the customer will do the effort of getting it working for them.
Also there is an EAC version made for Wine. Obviously it can't counter cheats executing at Ring 0 or something similar, but it's the same for every OS.
Even in cases where it should be low-friction (Unity/Unreal games) the friction is still too high to be really financially viable.
Vulkan would plausibly help the driver instability issues, but I'd imagine the Linux support costs will still be higher just given how little consistency there is between distributions.