If PulseAudio, Wayland, etc are all some of the worst software then how does it keep ending up in distros like Debian? If there are better alternatives why would they willingly adopt it?
After a few painful years though, the bugs got fixed in the "right" places, and that's part of why Pipewire (also developed by Red Hat) was able to come along and replace it so quickly.
And thankfully Pipewire addresses a lot of the actually legitimate issues with PulseAudio