My first thought in reading the question was “if your browser is doing that, your platform architecture has… some room for improvement”.

Having room for nontrivial improvement is, to be fair, a normal state of affairs for platforms.

This has certainly made conference calls significantly more usable. I feel like it must have come around during 2020, because I feel like pre-covid I would go around BEGGING everyone I did calls with to get a headset, because otherwise everyone else's voice would echo back through their microphone 0.75s later. Today I recently realized I could just literally do calls out loud on my laptop mic and speaker and somehow it works. Nice to know why!