audio muting bluetooth after 15.7 upgrade?

I have some apps (Radio Paradise, Eufy) that are playing most of the time. When I watch a YouTube video and pause it all other audio is paused as well. This behavior started approximately when the Mac was upgraded two upgrades ago. (Not sure which numbers they were, current is 15.7.1 so I guess it must have been 17.1) I was hoping that the 15.7.1 was fixing the issue.

YouTube is normally playing in Chrome, which limited to Google apps. For all I know it is possible that Chrome is overstepping and is able to mute all audio when it stops playing. They have frequent updates so...?

The easy test is to run YouTube from another browser like Firefox and FF shows the same behavior (Idid not test Safari). Killing the browser does not help, but restarting RP brings back the audio.

Monitoring the Sound menu (showing all audio apps) does not alter the volume slider. And if I pick another output the volume is not affected, such as Mac Studio Speakers and External Headphones or in-monitor speakers.

The audio has been weird where the volume is not as high as it used to be and now when I play audio over Bluetooth it has a lot more white noise which is new.

My Bluetooth speaker is a Fishman Loudbox Artist which is made for instruments but the I/O levels are not matching headphone levels fortunately Bluetooth solved that. Which makes me realize that in my office I have a different setup than I have here (I'm currently in another state than my office). When I used Bluetooth there with different amplifiers (music speak for speaker with a builtin amp) I never noticed the above muting.

Certainly Bluetooth does not carry some muting signal with the audio, it's simply data to it. Likewise it seems odd of a browser to send a mute command specifically to Bluetooth when it is not likely to know anything about the audio outputs of the system anyway.

Which is why to me it appears that MacOS is the one muting (90% down) all signals to Bluetooth when the video stops playing in a browser (~2 sec later).