I second the comment about pipewire. There are graphical utilities that can help with routing. Take a look at "qpwgraph" for that. It is set up kinda like a puzzle, but once setup it restores your prevoius set ups. The initial setup can be a lot. Especially since it fights the default audio settings of your distro. But in my experience not as much as windows. It only does routing though. There is no volume setting, muting, etc. That still has to be done via the regular sound settings.

Now I believe voicemeeter has functionalities for gates, compressors and other effects. I have tried easyeffects recently and... well it works. But it can be tedious in combination with qpwgraph. None of this is as streamlined as voicemeeter unfortunately. But I admit that may also be due to my own incompetence.

If you were using the vban utility of voicemeeter, there is a linux version on github, which you need to build yourself. It is commandline only, but the protocol is the same and it is high quality realtime audio streaming in your network. It works well in combination with qpwgraph.