skullgiver
It depends on your desktop environment. For GNOME, you can try jiggle. For me, Jiggle is listed as incompatible, unfortunately.
The built-in accessibility setting for finding your mouse is the Windows-style "press left ctrl to highlight the mouse". KDE has the same feature, though they're working on including a macOS-like jiggle feature in the upcoming Plasma 6 release.
Pipewire comes with a bunch of wrappers so that PulseAudio and JACK applications still work. You can use pavucontrol to change the volume settings on Pipewire without any issues.
People who don't know that they're using Pipewire may not even notice and think they're still on Pulse, that's how good the Pipewire integration is.
I've run into issues like OP describes myself, but for me this was fixed with a reboot.
You can configure Linux to be flicker free through a few kernel parameters (mainly quiet and loglevel=3, but likely also something to set the resolution early during the boot process or to maintain the resolution the computer started with.
The groundwork was laid years ago, distros juet don't enable it by default. Grub will even put the vendor logo back for you after selecting a boot device!