If you often don’t want to hear the audio, why have autoplay on at all? You can just press P. And isn’t the goal here to learn to use the language in real world situations which are often full of noises and distractions? Nobody is forcing you to go to the next question or start reading it while the previous audio plays, but I’m forced to waste time and can’t proceed if I want to finish listening (which is almost always the case).
And do you have any data to back your “would negatively affect more users” claim? This is the behavior of wanikani, I haven’t seen people complaining about it on it’s forum, but have seen people complaining about bunpro’s behavior here.