iMovie precision audio editing issues- difficulty editing clips properly

Just got a new MacBook Air (13 inch) because my old MacBook Pro stopped working, and there's something I've noticed that I want to see if other people can figure out if there's a solve for: basically I do video editing as a hobby in iMovie, since it's something I do for fun on the side I don't want to invest in a possibly better editing software since this does the job just fine, but one problem: I like to edit clips in a very precise manner, which on my old MacBook (from 2019 or so) I just quickly hit the spacebar to pause and unpause to find the exact moment to stop and start the clip. Here, maybe because of the spacebar responsiveness or because it's a newer version of iMovie (I admittedly did not update the MacOS on my old computer for a while), the audio cuts out whenever I pause, making it incredible difficult and frustrating to pinpoint the exact audio start/stop moments I want. I want to know if anyone else can try this for themselves, see if they have trouble doing it with the current version of iMovie, and if there are any workarounds. Would greatly appreciate it!