AI saves me again. ChatGPT sucked but Grok pulled through. Apparently, there's a setting ONLY on the Github version to allow a persistent notification and you have to like enable restricted app usage. I couldn't find any information about this by searching around the internet, Reddit, or the actual Github page. Wtf man. Hopefully that fixes the issue.
It's a little annoying that I now constantly have an icon in my notifs but it could be worse.
Okay, I think I ACTUALLY have it working now. In addition to doing literally everything else, if I keep the actual app open and locked it seems to work. So I'll just have to remember that whenever I'm playing music on my phone I guess!
Kind of crazy how ridiculous this has been, I've been searching for the solution for literal days.