Choppy playing on new Debian/Ubuntu

Since Debian switched from native pulseaudio support to emulation of 
pulseaudio with pipewire-pulse, I have experienced choppy playback from 
SoX, consisting of 0.1 second fragments interspersed with moments of 
silence, also making playback happen at about half speed overall.

That was on an older laptop (but not very) and a user has just reported 
the same effect under WSL2 (Microsoft's Linux-under-Windows system, 
based on Ubuntu).

https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/issues/852

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1036586

My own solution was to remove pipewire-pulse and install pulseaudio 
proper, which seemed to fix it, but a better solution found with 
marcIhm's help is to set the environment variable AUDIODRIVER=alsa to 
bypass pulseaudio to make SoX use the lowest-level interface, "where the 
rubber meets the road".

As Audacity seems to have a similar problem, there's probably not much 
we can do to sox_ng to help with this, except for making it avoid using 
pulseaudio if there is a better alternative. By default, SoX tries to 
use, in order: coreaudio (MacOS), pulseaudio, alsa, waveaudio (Windows), 
sndio, oss, sunau and ao. Is changing the order to put alsa before 
pulseaudio likely to break anything for anybody?

    M