please address the fact that you can’t hear anything properly, can’t tell where it’s coming from, how far away it is, and that as soon as there’s more than a few enemies on screen it’s impossible to hear anything
yep, it’s often not clear where a specific sound is coming from, until you have the enemy in your face.
And enemy spam does not help with this issue at all.
Issue has indirectly gotten worse because of the new spawn system in regular missions, there’s now always elites on the screen which means audio channels are fuller than usual (or something, I assume that’s one culprit)
It’s most likely part of the problem. I’m not a game dev or audio engineer, but from a podcast about another game I heard an interesting game dev fact. If you play a lot of sounds at once, game engines can max out the available audio channels, which results in some sounds not playing at all. There are ways around it, prioritising specific sounds and mixing them together.
I’m sure there is much more to it, and back in time I provided a suggestion to CMs that we would like to see a dev blog on the issue of “Missing Audio Cues” and related to this challenges. I’m sure this was missed in all the noise on the forum, and instead we got a blog post about office pets or something 
lmao, it takes a special kind of effort to make a post about cute cats a dogs divisive, but FS found a way.
Well, at least I am not crazy. There have been moments where I hear a trapper or a dog and I am waiting for it to show up and then it comes from a direction completely different then where the sound was. The only enemy that hasn’t done this to me is pox bursters but that’s probably because they make so much damn noise. Trappers are sadly the most common to bug out, sometimes the net launch sound not playing but thankfully it’s rare. Still needs to be fixed though.
Maybe for Havoc, but everything below Havoc is:
I used to use what you just said as the main argument against enemy spam until someone asked to provide a source for this claim.
I guess I was right after all…