Nothing had broken for so long, but then gstreamer upgraded to 1.22.8-2 and broke the sound in the system.
Sounds like an unwelcome situation! Sound is working here in VLC and my browser after updating, if you provide more details of the affected hardware and software and method of encountering the issue it might help others understand it better. I am using Alsa only without pulseaudio or pipewire.
After the update and reboot, it was written in the sound settings that there were no suitable devices or something like that. I didn't look at the logs, I just installed the previous version (1.22.8-1).
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
I'm using pantheon de and pulseaudio.