One of my least favorite features of VLC (tied with network stream interruptions killing the playback rather than reconnecting) is that VLC guesses your audio hardware's sampling rate itself (rather than using the hardware's self-reported rate), and resamples even audio-only files that match your hardware's self-reported rate. And every time you seek in a file, VLC's guess of the hardware sampling rate is thrown off, causing VLC to start pitch-shifting the sound just enough (usually just barely, but sometimes up to 1 semitone) for you to notice and start doubting your sanity, if the audio pitch actually changed or if you're hallucinating things. There's a long-running bug report at https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287.

I think PipeWire does something similar to synchronize multiple audio devices without a shared word clock, but I haven't tested how much its rate analyzer drifts when starting/stopping playback or in steady state.