Thanks for bringing this up! I’ve deployed a change and now inline videos and audio play separately, and if you hit “Play in Mini Media Player”, it will pause your audio/video and continue playing in the mini media player. They are now separate players, which means you can play inline video and audio while another video/audio plays in the mini media player.
I think this is a better experience, but I would be open to maybe having a setting that overrides the play button on audio/video and simply plays it in the mini media player so you never get caught with it not playing automatically in a “backgroundable” player.