Yeah, that's exactly what killed it for me. ALSA produced weird sounds... After a long time of trying various things, the solution was "emerge -e @world" (recompile everything).
I will gladly endorse the "learn the root cause why it doesn't work" motto from the article. That will serve everyone well, though be judicial when to apply it. Some things are not worth it.
> Those fields are C, Unix, and Computer Networking.
Learning C is a dead end, soon to be nearly illegal dead end (memory unsafe languages are not conductive to secure software and laws on sw security are being passed).
I took a lot from my time with Linux, bash is great (to me preferable to powershell, though idea to pass object is quite appealling), but now mostly in form of WSL.
I have encountered a lot of weird bugs and I am at the point of my life, when I don't want to spend on a long time studying obscure configuration file with multitude of options (at least they have often explanations and examples... sound of progress).
I will take my happy abstracted layer (linux docker mostly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).