Have you tried doing video + pipewire yet?
I am also using v4l2loopback, but its annoying to juggle /dev/video* devices. I wanted to do video stuff in docker containers, and it would be amazing if I could do pipewire in each container and have no global state.
I couldn't get anything to work in Chromium. FireFox saw the device, but video didn't come across.
When you say +pipewire you mean just audio playback? If you are pushing video to a picture-in-picture overlay a user might expect that so yea you could write to the pipewire socket like any other program. It's usually fully open for you to do just that.
I use v4l2 regularly with OBS. In order for Chrome/Chromium to see it you need to make the device before launching Chrome/Chromium. You can start v4l2 devices automatically by setting a modprobe config for your kernel.
My v4l2 notes might be helpful http://technex.us/2022/06/v4l2-notes-for-linux/