HomePod AirPlay fails to resume playlist progress

Listening to playlists on my HomePod is a horrible experience for me, and I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same. I have a long playlist that I like to listen to throughout the day at different times. I'll listen for about 20 minutes in the morning when I'm in the kitchen. I'll listen again for a few minutes around noon when I prepare to go out for lunch and errands. I'll get in the car and continue with the same playlist. In each listening session, the playlist picks up where I left off from the previous listening session. This is how it has always worked with Bluetooth, and this is how it should be. Since I switched from an Amazon Echo speaker, which uses Bluetooth, to the HomePod, which uses AirPlay, my simple use case of listening to a Music playlist via an external home speaker has been thrown into disarray because the HomePod auto-disconnects from AirPlay shortly after I stop playing the playlist. This causes the playlist to restart every time I reconnect to the HomePod.

Furthermore, when I listen to the playlist in the car, it starts over as if I never listened to it at home, even if I stop playing it at home via the HomePod and then go directly to the car to start playing it. Initially, I thought this was a glitch, but could this simply be the way AirPlay works? The Transfer/Move to option that appears on the phone to choose where music plays does not appear when playing to a Bluetooth speaker. That, and something I read on a forum about an AirPlay-connected device "hosts" the content being played, is why I believe this issue isn't a glitch but rather how AirPlay handles content. Can anyone shed some light on this? At this point, I plan on going back to an Amazon Echo, which I'm not happy about because the HomePod has better sound. But having to skip a bunch of songs to get back to my playlist is an untenable situation. FYI, I've updated to iOS 26.2, hoping it would fix the issue, but it didn't.