Just replying to myself - here is an update and apparently, the solution.
I was just wondering why only the Chromium variants here were affected, and why it looks like I am the only one on this planet expieriencing this issue.
While researching, I encountered this excellent tutorial: [HowTo] Troubleshoot crackling in PipeWire
In particular, it looks like
chromium --audio-buffer-size=2048 # Sets latency to about 40ms"
actually does the trick.
For my system, I had to set this value even to 4096 because it is quite old.
Possibly, the application default was changed recently, with respect to recent more powerful hardware.