And yet, it seems to be very popular and is the default audio system in many many Linux distros. It seems odd to me that such a poorly written and obtuse program would be readily embraced by the desktops and distros (and every other program that it needs to interface with).

If the downsides are so severe, it must have some really good upsides, otherwise no one would use it.

My personal anecdote is that Debian installed it for me on my long running system and that I've never touched a config file or otherwise looked at it at all and that my audio always works...