But here’s where Debian gets tripped up by the ecosystem: the moment you hit a login prompt, you enter a session with user-locked audio. This isn’t Debian’s fault. It’s the fault of PulseAudio, PipeWire, and the entire philosophy of session-bound audio daemons that don’t care what the kernel is doing.

It always seemed sus to me that Debian of all distros would stop adding ALSA by default, tbh. And for the crap that was PA at the time, too!

To make things worse, Systemd assumes everyone is willing, able and compliant, but even using Linux in the first assumes at least the latest one is not always true.