Sorry to hear about the network manager issues! I could be wrong on this, but I think Gnome is not the best supported DE in void - possibly because of how heavily tied it is to systemd. I wish I could help, but I still configure my wifi using wpa_supplicant.conf. Maybe dbus wasn’t setup properly?

Regarding audio, the pipewire documentation for Void is pretty good. It’s pretty thematic of the whole Void linux experience: you have to read the handbook and follow its steps closely, but it’s very well written and easy to understand. It can definitely be time-consuming as well though.

Void is definitely all the things you mentioned. I installed it on a few machines, the first in early 2020 and it has never given me an issue. Extremely stable and boring. I’m impressed that it has so many packages in its repository, but that’s a testament to how well xbps is written. But there are a few things missing since it’s fair from the mainstream, including packagekit. I had never heard of it before you mentioned it - I found a fork on github to support it, but it doesn’t look very well maintained.