Realtek driver installation gone wrong, audio and microphone stopped working

[Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS]I messed up. I tried fixing the issue some ubuntu users seem to have, namely that the sound volume is way lower than on windows (even with over-amplification enabled). I wanted to install Realtek driver to see if it would work better. I followed the instructions, got an error, it didn't work. I downloaded a Linux driver (3.0), v 5.18rc8 from Realtek website. It's a .tar.bz2 package containing an installation guide inside. The steps are: extracting everything, running ./configure inside the extracted directory, running make, and make install. I got an error on the last step, but I don't remember the details of it, and I don't think I should try to recreate it at this point. But after a reboot I found myself in a position that's worse.

1. Speakers and microphone don't work. All I get is 'Dummy output'.
2. alsamixer doesn't work. The terminal output is this:

ALSA lib confmisc.c:855:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'ALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_inum returned error: No such file or directoryALSA lib confmisc.c:422:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating stringsALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directoryALSA lib confmisc.c:1334:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating nameALSA lib conf.c:5178:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directoryALSA lib conf.c:5701:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directoryALSA lib control.c:1528:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL defaultcannot open mixer: No such file or directory

I tried reinstalling alsa-utils. Didn't help.

3. System Profiler and Benchmark doesn't display any audio devices anymore. Same goes for PulseAudio. However, running sudo lspci -v | grep -i audio does show 00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)

4. sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall returns All the available drivers are already installed.

I know it's probably annoying to answer questions like that, because basically I did it to myself. But I really don't know how to move forward from here and would very much appreciate some guidance.

editI booted to a previous kernel version and there everything works properly. From there I reinstalled the kernel I had been using, booted into it, and no luck. My latest kernel still doesn't have sound.