Pipewire makes me feel like I'm a bit stupid. I keep reading about it, I read the introduction and FAQ on their website, yet I still couldn't tell you what that thing even does. All I know is it's a slightly less buggy drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is something I use because Firefox forces me to. (I would still be on plain old ALSA if it weren't for Firefox.)
Also, it definitely did not "just work" for me out of the box, I had to do quite some digging and some very non-obvious stuff to get it to a) start up and b) let me use my microphone. I still don't even know what "starting up" really means for pipewire (is there a daemon or something?), the website likes to pretend that isn't a thing, but without doing some stuff to start it up, audio just won't work for pulseaudio and pipewire applications...