I thought the browsers prevented that.
How are they doing this?
They have a policy in Chrome [1]
Chrome does this by learning your preferences. If you don’t have browsing history, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where we see that the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound. As you browse the web, that list changes as Chrome learns and enables autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don’t. This way, Chrome gives you a personalized, predictable browsing experience.
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59409015/how-can-youtube...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_...