It’s been 20 years and pulseaudio is still flaky / high latency / incomprehensible. Professional flows that care use stuff like jack.
PipeWire replaced Pulse like five years ago; who is using Pulse at this point to make statements like "20 years" meaningful? It isn't really an ongoing concern.
Bear in mind the Knoppix creator had a blind wife, up to the point to creating A.R.I.A.N.E, one of the best distros for the blind (and it was merged with main KNOPPIX, making the distro one of the best accesible ones out there). Thus, proper audio mixing was mandatory.
With the bundled installer you could install it to as a Debian Testing install in the spot. As I didn't have internet at home, I remember using Knoppix before Debian Sarge because it had a huge amount of things to play and test without worrying about odd hardware setups.
