Using apulse for alsa audio in games launched via proton?

[Windsack]

This will be a little specific/newbie

I'm on manjaro, just running alsa and no pulseaudio which is sometimes a challenge (I think pipewire made it in this more recent release).

Media playback apps that allow specific selection of an alsa interface push audio over whatever I set as my default card just fine; HDMI from the gfx card or SPDIF from the motherboard. I've turned the approrpiate outputs up in alsamixer and all work as expected, besides proton apps. I've learned I can use launch option " apulse %command% " to fill in the gaps for apps that expect a pulseaudio server and this works for applications I launch in the terminal or any linux native game launched in steam to play audio with no issues.

I cannot get this launch option to playback audio for games that launch with proton, however. I have tried adding apulse %command% to the game's launch option, to the proton runtime's launch option, and adding apulse to common/bin/msidb after each 'exec' command of the relevant proton tool to try and insert this clause before the command to launch wine but no dice.

I am testing with outlast 2 and doom - games that had no issues pushing audio through pipewire with the pa-mixer style gui through however archlabs does routes this out of the box on my other machine. I want to avoid installing a full pulseaudio if possible.

Anyone else relying on apulse or a similar tool you would recommend for alsa for proton games? Searching protondb for key terms it seems like this is a problem others have struggled with.

Here's an (old) lutris fix but can I do this more gracefully in steam launch options/cli launch/directly editing wine all the wine prefixes? I'm probably missing something simple
https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/152