I feel the same about this. For me, It kills the best aspect of games, the playful learning. You just can’t go into any competitive game today without reading meta or you get crushed. But this is my free time. I want to spend it like that and just be creative and find my own solution to problems and still stand a realistic chance without having to have a second job studying the games meta. It’s the try and error discovery that made games fun for me and the feeling when you found your unique way to do things and others couldn’t counter it easily. But today it’s just about mastering a technique somebody else showed you.
You could easily process the audio and filter in on the device and just send the transcribed parts that match your filters for further processing. No need to send a constant audio stream. Eventually it would show up in the battery usage but things like the google song recognition also heavily use the mic and process audio and it doesn’t show up as heavy as you would expect.