Could this be something to do with the audio profiles you have set up using pavucontrol? Kinda a shot in the dark here not sure if this would even work but try removing pavucontrol and pulseaudio-qt. See if that helps
Just checking through the Arch linux support about youtube sound issue, there I got to know yotube checks for pulse audio for codec, reason might be I have added that in sound. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=228003
My friend all of pulseaudio's dependencies are fullfilled by pipewire using pipewire-pulse. I too don't have pulseaudio in my system but I can surf and listen to YT, etc across multiple browsers.
Also it's a known fact that pulseaudio is causing issues in garuda. You can search forum.
btw, the post you linked is from 2017... That's ancient for rolling release. pulseaudio was hip then not now.
Can you try to see if linux-lts helps your case. Not related but someone recently had bluetooth issues here and removing pulseaudio, reinstalling pipewire and linux-lts and switching to it seems to have solved it for them you can try to see if that helps your case too.
sudo pacman -S linux-lts linux-lts-headers
and try switching to linux-lts. See if that helps.