I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even know what Pulse Audio is. It should just quietly do it’s thing. The fact that I know it’s name tells you enough. I have to constantly kill it in order to stop terrible audio distortions. It often struggles managing multiple audio sources from different applications. It completely fails at managing bluetooth devices often forcing audio output that sounds like AM radio and requiring a complete system reset in order to allow high fidelity output. Pulse Audio is the worse and most unacceptable part of my Linux Distro and should be completely abandoned as a total failure and an embarrassment to any developer who is shameless enough to take credit for working on it.
Six years same distro on one machine is a good run. I don’t have much experience running Mint (Debian mostly) so I can’t say if it’s part of some bigger problem. Upgrading shouldn’t be difficult.
You could also consider how pipewire is on other distros. Fedora is constantly getting new tech earlier than some other distros, so pipewire has been there for some time.
FWIW, on debian I always got rid of pulseaudio and just used ALSA, until pipewire came around.