I know this is just a meme, but I think it's an important clarification: The rule of thumb is ~6 months' worth of expenses, not salary. It really is important to hold you over in case of sudden job loss, since it takes most people 3-6 months to find a new job (but it doubles as a fund for genuine emergencies too, which can save your ass for stuff like unexpected medical or vet bills).
But unfortunately, lots of people live paycheck to paycheck, so for them, a month's worth of expenses is the same thing as a month's salary...
I had the same audio crackling issues in Helldivers on Pop!_OS too. What fixed it for me was following mmstick's (Pop!_OS dev) instructions from his reddit post about audio crackling, particularly the
headroom
advice (I think somewhere between 256-512 worked for me):Edit: also Pop!_OS uses pipewire by default for a few years now, not pulse audio