On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.

I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.