And yet, most who have tried Pipewire and commented about the experience online report that Pipewire via PulseAudio APIs does the job better and with less bugs than PulseAudio.
Latency is measurably better than PulseAudio even via pipewire-pulse.
edit: I think the confusion is over my use of the word "shim". Pipewire doesn't route through PulseAudio, it replaces PulseAudio but includes an implemenation of the same API. There's no increase in latency or complexity because there's no extra steps.
