As I recall it was rarely enabled by default and was a pain to set up so in practice not really used.

The most common solution at the time was PulseAudio, which was so bad it usually was better to just use direct ALSA and live with the idiotic one-at-a-time limitation.

Thankfully Pipewire seems to actually work reliably so I guess that's at least one thing ticked off the Year of the Linux Desktop checklist.