Thank you! Not spam, and no apologies needed 
I ultimately chose to disable the audio queue as well, but in case anybody else comes across this, the sound is played by a separate process called ālibcanberraā. It shows up briefly as a Playback Stream then removes itself making itās settings inaccessible. You would need to adjust itās default configs to reduce playback volume as the process launches or perhaps KDE has a way to reduce default volumes of new devices. I dunno if it even has an API for such a thing, but it is the correct direction.
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You might notice that I explicitly include libcanberra in my rules. It is one source of notifications, but itās only one of many, and whatās more, libcanberra also does sounds which are not notifications, so between these things, you canāt just filter for that process.
The direction youāre speaking of, leads to a pipewire rule which sets the volume for the stream when it is created. Thatās what the solution I posted above achieves, but it does so, rather than by setting each notificationās volume directly, by directing libcanberra and all its noisy friends, to one place, and creates a slider in the mixer for that, so that we can set all their volumes, any time we like, and set maximums, mute them all, and other nice stuff.
I popped by today with a bit of news about this subject, which is a recent/ongoing feature addition to wireplumber Iāve been watching them add, which will automatically create virtual devices and automatically route sounds through those devices, based on their āroleā such as Notifications, Media, Calls, etc, and provide a separate volume slider for each.
Basically, wireplumber is adding an automatic version of what I wrote up there. It will be nice for us because it will be easier to set up (not that itās very difficult now honestly!) but especially because it will be standardised, so it will be suitable for distros to implement it (I saw Phosh is doing it at the moment). So, the āNotifications Volume sliderā might come back in an official form, in the not-too-distant future, maybe along with some other convenient audio controls.
Until then weāve still got that config above. BTW Iām still running that rule and it hasnāt caught any false positives or failed once since the previous posts. Itās working well.
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This seems to be the related KDE bug: 428267 ā Sounds made by notifications donāt respect āNotificationsā volume level in Audio Volume KCM.
Also thanks for the workaround!
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