Are you sure your speakers aren’t powering down after a delay without input? You might be able to solve this issue and the popping with better speakers.

Hyprland requires Wayland. It can’t be started on an Xserver.

Can I just say we’re proud of you?

I understood that. I am also using pipewire, but is is just the backend for pulseaudio. Did you strip out PA completely? I suggested restarting it because PA can be weird after resuming from suspend.

Does restarting PA help? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting#No_sound_after_resume_from_suspend