Bouzas: PipeWire, the media service transforming the Linux multimedia landscape

Sorry you are right, it's not deprecated. I may be confusing it with "paman".

But it's my understanding that pavucontrol was not intended to be the primary UI, in favor of tools integrated into the desktop system, such as "gnome-control-center sound". This sentiment is already present in a 2007 post by Poettering about integrating PulseAudio with Gnome. [1] So I don't consider CPU usage of a specialist UI to reflect badly on PulseAudio itself.

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-O...