Xfree? Who's talking about that? I've only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its """"modern"""" replacement Wayland doesn't even start a full desktop session on my machine)

No, we're talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I... think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven't delved enough to check.

Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.