Comment by throwaway984393

Sigh... Because systemd, dbus, polkit, pulseaudio, rtkit, etc are invasive weeds. Apps now depend on them exclusively so often that you have to provide some shim to replace their ABI if you don't want to use those components. I can't remember the specifics but pipewire probably only casually references it as part of a compatibility layer. In Alpine I'm pretty sure you can run pipewire without polkit but I'd have to check.