Youtube autoplay not working in background tab (again?)

[dj-mothman]

In issue #1072 the user describes behaviour where they are able to have a youtube video automatically play at the end of the previous youtube video, even if the user is in a different tab. However, in my project I'm not able to reproduce this behaviour.

My app basically works like this:

1. User connects to the front end and adds a song to the queue
2. Back end detects this and sets the "currently playing" song in the database
3. Front end detects that the "currently playing" song has been updated and stores it in state
4. ReactPlayer url prop is updated based on the url of the "currently playing" song in state
5. Song ends, back end detects this and sets the "currently playing" song to the next song in the queue
6. Repeat 3-5 until queue is empty

This is all working fine when the user has the tab focused, but if the user goes to another tab, then when the current song finishes the next song won't play automatically. If the user opens the tab again then the video starts playing as expected. Currently I'm only using youtube videos, so there is no effect from having different players etc.

While investigating, I came across issue #7 which suggests that this may have been an issue which was fixed back in 2015, and as I said issue #1072 seems to suggest that this was working as expected as recently as November 2020. Because of this I feel like there must be a problem with the way that I have written my front end which is stopping this behaviour from working, but having tried a few different things (messing with playing prop and onStart/onPause handlers etc.) nothing I do seems to have any effect.

Is it possible that there been a recent change to the way google chrome's autoplay policy works which has broken this functionality?