I wasn't tearing out components. I was doing everything exactly the way I'd been doing forever, and it no longer worked. Which is bad in itself, but maybe it's understandable that niche usecases break every now and then. It's just that it's happened so often and for so many parts of the system that it's hard for at least me to think it's isolated incidents rather than a cultural issue.

The truly toxic part is that every single transition adds complexity and reduces transparency, making it harder and harder to understand the system. It's just not the breakage alone, or the complexity alone, or even the lack of transparency. It's the combination of all of those.

In the start of this thread jrockway proudly says that all you need is deep understanding all the components and the system as a whole. Back in the day this was not actually an unreasonable thing. But it's been getting less and less reasonable for a long time.

(Incidentally the audio example in my original message wasn't even directly related to pulseaudio. It was a few years back, but IIRC it was some daemon tweaking the device permissions, and something else adding users to a special group in the GDM login path but not the console one.)