Annoyance 3 -- or something very similar -- is going to be the case for any bluetooth headset. There simply isn't enough bandwidth in a bluetooth connection to

Annoyance 3 -- or something very similar -- is going to be the case for any bluetooth headset. There simply isn't enough bandwidth in a bluetooth connection to have a high quality audio stream and a microphone stream going at the same time, so a bluetooth headset switches between high-quality-headphones and low-quality-headset modes. You can experience this in action by listening to music via a bluetooth headset then performing something which toggles them to headset mode (e.g. navigating to a Google Meet page or whatever). I suspect there is a brief delay when switching modes, so the AirPods don't switch while actively playing anything. So immediately firing up some music before the AirPods switch back to headphone mode probably keeps them in headset mode.