> At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a software level. This way the mic is always hot and ready to relay audio as fast as the software can switch.

Another solution is to mute at the microphone, if your hardware has a button for that. This way the application can do whatever it wants, it will still get nothing. Using the hardware button is often less effort, than switching windows, finding that unmute button visually and moving the mouse to that button to click it. Or one could use push to talk. Since there are ways to mute yourself without having to do it in the app, it would be acceptable, if unmuting took a part of a second to be effective, indicating that by some "unmuting ..." label somewhere.