The last two upgrades have broken my audio setup.
First the options for Network Server and Network Access in paprefs were greyed out and my sinks disappeared after upgrading to bookworm. I just had to create a link to an existing file and it was working again but, it's weird that it was needed in the first place. Pretty sure it has something to do with the change from pulseaudio to pipewire but I'm not very up to date on that subject and I just want to have my current setup to continue working.
Then yesterday I just launch a simple apt-get upgrade and after rebooting my sinks disappeared again. The network options in paprefs were still available, but changing them did nothing. I had to create the file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/10-gsettings.conf and stuff it with "pulse.cmd = [ { cmd = "load-module" args = "module-gsettings" flags = [ "nofail" ] } ]" in order to have my sinks back.
I know it's not only a Debian thing, as I can see this happening to people on Arch forums, but as Debian is supposed to be the "stable" one, I find it amusing that a simple upgrade can break your sound.
I've also used pulseaudio for this sort of things in the past, it's very flexible and works rather well!
When it works (!), it's one of the reasons I brag to my tech friends about Linux, and why I switched to Linux many many years ago. In fact, it was when Esound was a thing. But once in a while it stops working after an upgrade or a dist-upgrade, and I have to spend time trying to fix it.
I like to joke around with tech minded friends that Windows keeps breaking with every updates, but then I have to spend an hour finding out why my sinks disappeared after an upgrade, and I'm forced to realize that... sigh... these things happen with Linux too.
You could maybe look into using SnapCast, it would be independent from pulse and should work even through apt updates ;)
I haven't been using pluseaudio for an eternity, since the Linux machines I use are mostly headless,.yet I was a pluseaudio fanboy when it was.just replacing ALSA. Yet, the hours and hours pulseaudio cost me to fix some upmix that had stopped working or some other weird shit... IDK if I'd still preach it's upsides would I be in the same situation now.
I tend to like it. I use it even on some headless machines (for example for streaming audio). I'm gonna have to learn more about using Pipewire sadly.