So I have got into the habbit of "turning off" WiFi via control center as I'm setting up what to listen to as I'm leaving the house and the playback pause issue is gone. With the current behaviour of control center it will "re-enable" WiFi by the time I get home so I don't forget to swap back to WiFi and eat up my cell data.
EDIT: When I want to turn WiFi completely off, I have a shortcut to do just that which I added to to the Assistive Touch menu.
That would serve everyone's preferences and reasons: People who only turn the stuff off from the control panel would get the temporary behavior of those controls. People who turn them off at the system level would get the persistent behavior.
They do. Go into setting and turn it off - that’s what happens