The Windows ecosystem is invisibly fragmented by the million policies that change depending on install version, tier and patch level and largely misunderstood.

See for example the pages of complaints about windows forced planned reboot features deemed unavoidable from the hn majority, let alone the common users.

I was on jury duty last week and watched a windows update slow-motion-trainwreck the proceedings for 30 minutes while 30-ish people sat there and waited on it.

Yes, video conferencing does it, but so does slack sometimes at startup, discord does it if you join a voice-enabled room, flash (RIP) used to do it in our HR time tracking app, and at home deviantart.com does it and games do it. However, whether or not a competent and interested nerd can figure out the underlying logic is completely beside the point. Normies don't stand a chance, so they just put up with (from their perspective) randomly broken or low-quality audio, until they can't, at which point they restart, switch devices, or maybe even buy a new device.

Any one of {Bluetooth SIG, device manufacturer, Microsoft} could have independently fixed the issue. Every one of them should have forseen it. None of them foresaw it and none of them fixed it, and years later it still lingers. Yikes.

There’s a specific setting, enabled by default, that removes or reduces other noise whenever Windows detects “communications activity”: https://appuals.com/stop-skype-lowering-volume-sounds/