This is super helpful feedback- thank you! I had such a hard time wrangling my sound scheduling. I even tried a method where I output samples with a second of silent lead up so I can query the godot audio engine for its current buffer latency (something I found possible form a github issue), but I still couldn't get it to be as consistent as I wanted. It looks like there's actually a PR for godot 4.7 that may be accepted which allows more fine tune control / scheduling with the engine so there isn't a need for so much hackiness.
I plan on giving this game another round of design outside of any hard deadline because I really wanna get this feeling right.
Thanks again for playing and for the feedback