#PulseAudio was starting to work somewhat reliably, so the fd.o people decided it was time to break everybody's setups again by moving over to #PipeWire which is a drop-in replacement except when it's not, for example for everybody using pacmd.
On an unrelated note, I just finished adapting my #AwesomeWM audio widget to use pactl (which requires multple popen calls to get the current state) instead of pacmd (that allowed the entire state to be retrieved with a single popen).