Rather, Gnome stopped supporting ALSA directly around 2007, and Firefox did the same in 2017. Yes, you could use alternatives like JACK or sndio. The point was that a new Gnome broke the reliance on ALSA, as a user, you had to migrate off ALSA which you likely had used for a decade before. Naturally, most users migrated to the best-supported option, the distro's default, which was Pulse Audio both on Fedora and Debian.
