Nowadays, is this reasonable to consider disabling the period wakeup as default instead of expecting period wakeup by default?
I'd say yes - it's been nearly 10 years since this capability was added, and it's quite common across HDaudio, Chrome, Android plaforms.
But considering this as a default doesn't mean it's available in 100% of the cases, you still you need to check that
a) the driver is capable of disabling the period wakeup b) the driver is capable of providing a precise position outside of period elapsed events (usually marked with the INFO_BATCH capability).
alsa-lib gives you the means to query both cases.
Note that you also have the case where you cannot disable interrupts but can still use timer-based solutions (e.g. for USB audio).
Hope this helps -Pierre