I have no idea why pipewire is included in KDE editions. It's exceedingly buggy and should never have found its way into production systems. You got lucky with sudo apt-get autoremove --purge pipewire* because when I do it on an Ubuntu-based KDE, it takes the entire desktop with it.

The better way to deal with pipewire is to disable it in systemd then pin it in apt.

sudo systemctl --global disable pipewire

sudo apt-mark hold libpipewire* pipewire*

That disables pipewire and prevents it from getting updated, which could potentially re-enable it.

If you want to control the default audio device, I recommend pavucontrol.

sudo apt install pavucontrol

It will allow you to specify the default output devices and control all audio inputs and outputs.