Okay since wanting to add the jaws intro theme over my mic since megaladon.... I dove into voicemeeter banana and tried to get things working to no avail as such the 3 threads previous detailed.
The main issue:
If you have voicemeeter as your input, you will see chat bubble, but cannot hear them, nor get the voice com icon showing you are talking. All other game audio works normal.
What I tested in windows audio settings:
SoT will change the audio output, but will not budge on audio input after game launches.
This is for both app specific modification, and the leaving it to default, and changing the default output.
When changing anything to do with input, it ignores those changes until next launch.
So there is a disconnect in SoT between how it handles the input and output of audio.
Not sure if that is intentional or not, but could be something they look into as a source of the problem.
The issue of seeing the chat bubble for ingame chat seems to be an awkward one to explain.
If you are being detected as in xbox party, you don't see it. If you are in discord or skype/etc it just works as normal. It is as if not having a "correct" microphone input mutes them without placing you out of the prox chat.
I have tested every setting combination of windows 10 and which output and input to use on voicemeeter to no avail.
For reference of chat icon.