I agree. One way to ameliorate this problem is to only allow sites to even ask for permission to autoplay content with sound if the user has manually played a video a few times in the past.
More generally, you can set permission settings to be very conservative by default and not allow sites to bother the user with permissions until the user has interacted positively with the site several times in the past. Here, "positively" could be a fairly fuzzy rule of thumb depending on the global trustworthiness of the site and the sensitivity of the permissions requested.
Whatever the solution is, it should be consistent and easily knowable by the average user.
How would a website tell a user to enable auto-playing video for a website that they want it for (for example, how would youtube tell users to enable that)? How would the user even understand that this website won't work correctly for them but it works fine for their friends/family/other-browsers?
I've made a web-app that uses camera access, and the web audio API. Without either of them, the app is 100% useless, so locking those behind a permission that won't even show up until the user has been there for a while completely kills that app.
While I understand you are only talking about auto-playing video, the point still stands IMO. Trying to "guess" what the user wants is wrong when it comes to enabling/disabling features.
Your concerns are definitely valid, but note that every time the Chrome team chooses a browser default, or doesn't include a permission setting for every possible ability, they are guessing what the user wants. And these guesses will not be the same made by other browsers, so the user may still be confused why something works for their friends but not them. "Smart permissions" seem strictly better to me than allowing autoplay ads or no autoplay youtube, and reducing user frustration may just require ad-hoc tricks, e.g., filling the bank spot of a non-auto-played video with a permission dialog box. Likewise, using global trustworthiness information about a website could greatly improve guesses.
More generally, you can set permission settings to be very conservative by default and not allow sites to bother the user with permissions until the user has interacted positively with the site several times in the past. Here, "positively" could be a fairly fuzzy rule of thumb depending on the global trustworthiness of the site and the sensitivity of the permissions requested.