It's wild to me that we all recognized autoplay was a problem, Google broke a bunch of websites, there was a big stink around it, and so 5 years later... we still haven't solved autoplay. Nothing has changed, we just stopped talking about it.
I made a demo showing how easy this was to circumvent in 2018 and it works just as well today in both Chrome and Firefox as it did in 2018, nothing has improved since then: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ (link has autoplaying audio).
Right, that's the point. How often do you browse a web page and never click on anything or highlight any text? If you're interacting with a SPA like Twitter or Facebook, it's impossible for you not to have a user action by the time you run into a video. It's fairly common for web articles to put everything except the first two paragraphs behind a "click to expand" button. What that does is force you to invisibly give them permission to autoplay audio.
Chrome introduced a solution where in practice, videos still all autoplay (the demo doesn't show this, but if you start a video muted you're still allowed to autoplay it), and then 15 seconds into browsing the page you still get hit with a blast of music. And in the process of doing that, they also broke a substantial number of web games.
And, also, the restrictions don't apply if you're browsing within a domain, so if you click on a CNET article and then click a link to another CNET article, now the second article has permission to play even without a user gesture. "In response to a user gesture" is such a weak protection. Highlighting text counts as a user gesture.
My preference would have been for Chrome to just auto-mute that tab as soon as audio started playing, and allow the user to unmute it themselves not as a gesture that "implies" consent, but by explicitly clicking the unmute button.
I don't think the current solution solves anything at all, I think it's worse then what we started with. Particularly on mobile, it's extremely easy to accidentally tap on a website. In my opinion, it's effective the same thing as just allowing autoplaying audio, I feel like they might as well have changed nothing.
Edit: I've got a longer article I wrote in 2018 that goes into more problems, but a lot of them are orthogonal to the current conversation and are mostly focused on the impact to web games and criticizing Google's communication with developers, so I tend to just directly link to the demo when talking about it nowadays (https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/)
I made a demo showing how easy this was to circumvent in 2018 and it works just as well today in both Chrome and Firefox as it did in 2018, nothing has improved since then: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ (link has autoplaying audio).