I knew about OP's problem for years with discord's piece of shit webapp being the most egregious offender. For my system the sound falls into a low power state and there's an audible pop/click when something wakes it up. Even with the tab silenced and all notifications turned off it would still periodically do this. Other sites that used WebRTC had same problem but not as frequent. I think I worked around the issue eventually by disabling the automatic low power state at the expense of some additional battery consumption.

> Computers are a really hostile environment for audio

My first thought was the author should be happy that they don't live back in the bad old days of computing. Audible noise was the norm, even when you were playing audio. At least for PCs with sound cards. I don't recall the situation being quite as bad on other platforms. Modern PCs are much better on this front.

I have vague recollections of a quote from the Computer Chronicles in the mid-1990's. It went to the effect of turning a $2000 computer into a $200 stereo ...