Ok so I removed Pulseaudio from Garuda Assistant and swapped it with Pipewire; through the GA, I received no messages about dependency conflicts.
After reboot it seems indeed pulseaudio is gone and pipewire reigns supreme. I expect this will be the end of the mic issues since I am almost certain it was relate to these 2 servers fighting over control.
I had a test call and a real one through MS teams and so far so good, no issues
╭─exanime at calcifer in ⌁
╰─λ inxi -Faz | grep Sound
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-214-tkg-bmq running: yes
Sound Server-2: JACK v: 1.9.19 running: no
Sound Server-3: PulseAudio v: 15.0 running: no
Sound Server-4: PipeWire v: 0.3.39 running: yes
I did have a strange issue afterwards. After the swap I rebooted the machine and suddenly all plasma elements were HUGE. A notification pop up would take half of the screen; however, regular apps (Firefox, Teams, Alacritty all displayed fine)
Nothing I did seemed to help so I went back to Garuda Assistant, removed all orphan packages and did a system update. The system update did bring back a few pulseaudio components but the server is still not running.
After another reboot my login screen (SDDM) is still gigantic but the desktop is displaying fine