iOS 18: AirPods won’t auto restart music after announcing a notification

Since updating to iOS 18 I experience the following issue: My AirPods reduce the volume of my music when announcing a notification (till here the behavior is as expected) but then they pause the music instead of increasing the volume back to normal. So every time I have to manually restart the playback. I Cannot believe that Apple has not fixed this error in one of the last 2 incremental updates of iOS 18. This never happened with any iOS before!

Device: iPhone 14 Pro

iOS: 18.0, 18.0.1 and 18.1

AirPods: 3 and 4 ANC

Possible solutions I tried (but no success):

• turn on the vocal shortcuts feature and turn it off again
• turn off the head movement feature
• restart iPhone

It's a shame that this is the user experience for brand new 200€ headphones (Airpods 4 ANC). Please let me know if anyone knows how to fix this.