I didn’t mind — ^W is not hard to type — but it does strike me as slightly odd that this seems to have been a conscious choice: “It is based on BitListen by Maximillian Laumeister”, which requests you click anywhere to unmute (https://www.bitlisten.com/).
If I remember correctly, back at the time they adapted BitListen into Listen to Wikipedia, Chrome's policy permitted autoplaying sound.
The "click anywhere to unmute" notification was something I added some time later, after the new autoplay policy, so that people wouldn't think the website was soundless or that sound was broken.
Google Chrome has changed its autoplay policy in the past few years [0] -- sites now require typically user interaction before they're allowed to start the audio context.
You can see this in the page's code [1] -- line 157 and further.
I was surprised to hear the page start playing right away though. Maybe Chrome's "whitelisting" has become more permissive..? See this [2] as well.
