Pulseaudio was introduced in 2004. How come it took almost 20y for it to be replaced if it was that bad?

Implementation, being what it is, improved the situation compared to alsa and other things before it. Again, while not perfect it made things better for everyone.

It’s funny that this is a thing attributed to poettering as bad since things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?

I really don’t get it.

And all of these things are optional. The fact that distro people and companies select them is because they solve real world problems.

People are idiots.

Poettering got death threats for systemd.

Is it really breaking it? As far as I’m aware, it’s more like gnu. It has components and you can select what you use (here meaning distros and packagers).

People mistake this for a monolith because it’s all named systemd-thing. Integration, like you said, was and is needed. But what if all those separate utilities and services are actually disconnected and speak some protocol different to pipe? Does it make it less unixy?

And poettering is an absolute good guy here. Pulseaudio wasn’t perfect, but did it improve things compared to what was there before? Sure it did. Even now, pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.

Perfect is the enemy of good. And while all these tools might not be perfect, they are the best in the Linux world.