I've occasionally seen issues on one of my machines where applications would send out garbled audio until I killed the PulseAudio process and restarted the application (the latter was insufficient alone; PA had to be killed). Hasn't happened lately, though, and it might've had more to do with the application.
I use Slackware, which tends to be more conservative about these things; the fact that PA is now the default in Slackware is a good indicator of PA having overcome its growing pains.
I have a feeling if PA was really as broken as it was once upon a time, Bluetooth audio would've been sacrificed in favor of a more stable and reliable system.
Additionally, I somewhat doubt BlueZ would've made PA such a hard dependency if they weren't reasonably sure that it's stable enough for primetime.
I use Slackware, which tends to be more conservative about these things; the fact that PA is now the default in Slackware is a good indicator of PA having overcome its growing pains.