The message is still to use the PulseAudio and JACK APIs. They are proven and they work and they are fully supported.
I know some projects now use the pw-stream API directly. There are some advantages for using this API such as being lower latency than the PulseAudio API and having more features than the JACK API. The problem is that I came to realize that the stream API (and filter API) are not the ultimate APIs. I want to move to a combination of the stream and filter API for the future.
Really? That is news to me … explains why mpv’s pipewire audio output was briefly broken a couple of months ago.
I heard it in a podcast, but here’s a written source on that: https://fedoramagazine.org/pipewire-1-0-an-interview-with-pipewire-creator-wim-taymans/