Chromecast Audio unreliable since certificate fiasco

So Google blew it earlier this year by letting one of their certificates expire, causing all the Chromecast Audio and Chromecast v2 devices worldwide to stop working for several days. They fixed it eventually, and devices started working again.

However, ever since then, the 6 Chromecast Audio devices I have in my home became incredibly unreliable in Home Assistant. I use them to make announcements via TTS / Piper, and play music from my local Plex server. Prior to this outage they might fail to make announcement or start playing 1-2% of the time and require a second attempt to work.

Since the “fix” by Google, I typically have at least 1 CCA become unavailable in HA each day. Announcements fail several times a day. And music fails to play a few times a day. As I type, none of my devices are currently able to play music, and 2 are showing as unavailable.

Is anyone seeing problems with their CCAs since the fix? I’ve tried rebooting all the devices, and rebooting my HA server to no avail.

When I check logs, I typically see some variation of this error

Logger: pychromecast.socket_client
Source: /usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pychromecast/socket_client.py:552
First occurred: 11:59:53 AM (3608998 occurrences)
Last logged: 1:18:17 PM

[Office speaker(192.168.2.58):8009] Unhandled exception in worker thread, attempting reconnect
[Master bedroom speaker(192.168.2.61):8009] Unhandled exception in worker thread, attempting reconnect
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pychromecast/socket_client.py", line 548, in run
    if self._run_once() == 1:
       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pychromecast/socket_client.py", line 649, in _run_once
    self._request_callbacks.pop(data[REQUEST_ID])(True, data)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pychromecast/controllers/receiver.py", line 220, in handle_launch_response
    callback_function(False, response)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.13/site-packages/pychromecast/controllers/plex.py", line 491, in app_launched_callback
    raise RequestFailed("PlexController.play_media")
pychromecast.error.RequestFailed: Failed to execute PlexController.play_media.

Help?

Update from the land of the weird. After hours of failure and rebooting everything with no luck, I just turned on the CCA via the media player card on/off button, then went into “Browse media” and navigated to a Plex playlist and pressed play, and suddenly it’s working again - my dashboard controls to play music work, my button automations to play music work, it all just works.

Yay for intermittent behavior. I wonder how long until it mysteriously stops again.