That just sounds like a browser bug though. Client side code shouldn't try to work around it, the website should just notify all users that Chrome is broken and won't play audio properly
That's ridiculously naïve. You can't just decide to let your product be broken for 80% of your users because it's technically their browser that's wrong.
I see these kinds of suggestions from technologists surprisingly frequently, and I always wonder if it's a serious suggestion and if the person has ever worked on anything with non-programmers as users.
At that time, about every audio library was broken for 80+% of the users. If you happened to maintain such a library, you received bug reports for sure (on your library). Chrome claimed their new implementation was inside specs, so it was unclear, if there would be a fix. As it happened, the specs were amended/clarified and Chrome returned to the previous behavior a few versions later.
I see these kinds of suggestions from technologists surprisingly frequently, and I always wonder if it's a serious suggestion and if the person has ever worked on anything with non-programmers as users.