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.