2010 iMac, audio not working, cured!

Hi all - a relative’s 2010 iMac is on its last legs, but deteriorated suddenly when the audio stopped working and little squares were following the cursor around the screen.
I set up a screen share via the Messages app; frustratingly there was a huge amount of lag that made this all but unusable. First bit of advice I found on Apple forums was to fire up the Audio Midi Setup app. This did not show any iMac audio devices, only the Apple TV.
Then I found a helpful article that suggested deleting the BezelServices.plist - and now miraculously the audio and the little squares are fixed. Apparently the poor thing wasn’t even making its startup chime, so we could tell right away that it was better when we rebooted. The other thing we are noticing is a little hiccup on the progress bar when booting up.
Here’s the helpful article:

I’m not sure what you tried but I had same issue with my MacBook pro with touchbar. All I had to do was reset PRAM and that fixed it. Saved a bunch of time.

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I was considering that too, fortunately this broken plist removal solved it. Makes me wonder how many other fragile plists are out there and how you would know to remove them.