I’ve been experiencing something similar lately and what I found helps is to go to your audio settings in your OS and change the audio output device to something else and then change it back to the correct one. If it doesn’t work the first try, try again.
I hope that helps. It works for me. I never had this issue until recently. It’s really annoying. :-/
I’m on POP!_OS. I’m sorry to hear it doesn’t fix it. :( I wonder if a recent update caused this.