IMPORTANT! - a fix if you have a PLAY button appearing at start of courses

I just want to be sure I understand. The only way to have my audio play on my second slide when using the "add a slide that runs for .25 seconds" fix is by having the user do something on that specific page.

I'm basing this on Ashley's comment in the thread "you'll need to have some user initiation on the first slide to allow the audio to play. This is browser and domain-specific as if the user has previously allowed audio to play on that site (i.e. pressed play, unmuted it, etc.) Chrome is keeping track of that and using it to determine how it should behave in the future."

We have several courses that were published that had this issue. We used the "add a slide" fix and it worked. Now we are updating and while we don't see the play button, the audio is no longer automatically starting. We are also experiencing the Play button showing on any engage interactions we have imported into Storyline. 

Are these two things related? Has anyone figured a fix for this? Any help is greatly appreciated!!