It more or less has been abandoned in favor of PipeWire - even at 0.3.something it's a better solution than Pulse ever was. Pipewire was started by Wim Taymans (previously of gstreamer so they had experience in AV plumbing), has a much better thought out architecture, and can act like a Pulse or JACK server so it transparently replaces either for most applications.

I'll give PulseAudio a little bit of a pass for triggering some cleanup in the lower levels as it tried to use features that no one knew were broken until it touched them, and being a first attempt at dealing with some of the modern-sound-architecture bullshit (ever look at how Intel baytrail platforms audo devices are attached? It's nightmare fuel), but it is, was, and always has been awful.

Or, if you want something simpler and less featured, you can use ALSA directly or sndio (originally from OpenBSD), though increasingly you'll have application compatibility problems doing so... but you mention Bluetooth, so use Pipewire.