[oatmeal_croc]

I mostly use Zoom for work calls, you can select microphones and speakers individually. I found that if you select your Airpods as your speakers and your laptop as your microphone, the sound quality on the Airpods suddenly get way better.

[microtonal]

Yes, because when you switch on the mic on most Bluetooth headphones, it will switch to the headset profile and use the SBC codec in place of AAC. Also see here for a longer description:

https://www.recadio.com/blog/why-is-bluetooth-sound-quality-...

Apparently newer generations of AirPods use the AAC-ELD codec which should improve this on Apple devices.

You should be able to see in Console.app what codec gets used.