Despite openQA clicking on the pause button three times, none of those clicks register. This is because plasmashell is busy rendering the artwork with shaders. Downstream report: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172763
Is this still a problem in Plasma 5.27? The widget's album art code has been rewritten since this bug report was submitted.
Yep, this was fixed with https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/118.
Great, thanks for following up!