Last tidbit: The pipewire audio modifications have been needed for over a year... this is unfortunately one of the things I keep seeing in stacks like this, things don't move super quick. But I ran into this stutter last week and pretty much landed on your exact workaround, after which I posted an issue on the PipeWire gitLab. It looks like they are aware this is a problem and a fix has been merged, it just hasn't been released yet. Given Kali is a rolling release I hope this will no longer be needed by v2025.1, but then, relying on these fixes happening quickly is inconsistent, so here's hoping. Excellent write-up in any case!