Have you guys ever faced problems with Xfce (or any other desktop) not saving Settings between reboots?
I’ve not had this on KDE. This may be a harsh suspicion, but I would attribute something like this to “Xfce jankyness”. Xfce is a janky DE that I’d only use if I were on some weak lappy. Otherwise, try KDE; that’s the best DE. 
(I’m also on Ryzen hardware, btw.)
As for the sound issue, it’s long resolved for me. I had automated a restart of the pulseaudio service (systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.service) on a nightly script for a week or two, then I disabled it, to see if the issue just stopped. And it did!