As of 26.2-snapshot-7, Mojang ruined music balancing and implemented a heavy bias towards new tracks
This is just a short summary of recent tweets by @rebel0459. They have also written a full PDF explaining the issue in more detail than I can: files.catbox.moe/yegc55.pdf
So, apparently, Minecraft has a music balancing feature. There are specific lists of tracks that can play within certain biomes and some tracks are less likely to appear than others, usually when they have more biomes they can appear in.
The feature used to somewhat undercut the tracks added in the 1.18 era, as some of them were designated to a few very specific biomes, but overall managed to organically implement new music and balance it out with existing tracks by C418.
As of version 26.2-snapshot-7, these internal weights have been removed from all pre-existing tracks in the game, completely ruining the balance, and, to add insult to injury, all of the 5 new tracks by Fingerspit (all amazing tracks btw but I digress) have received a bias of being twice as likely to be played in any pool they're in. On top of that, they have also been added to way more biomes than normal for new tracks in the game, each track appearing in 7-9 track pools.
As a result, no matter where you are in the game, you are way more likely to hear one of the 5 new tracks than anything else. Due to the weights system, these 5 tracks combined are also significantly more likely to be played in the default track pool (used for most vanilla biomes) than any of the TWELVE original C418's tracks. Zero hate towards the new tracks btw, Fingerspit did a great job, but it's just unclear why Mojang would ever make this change, and it feels like it could have catastrophic effects on the ambience and immersion in Minecraft, on which music has significant influence.
And as of May 15th, Mojang have doubled down on this change and labelled it as "works as intended". Here is the bugreport: https://report.bugs.mojang.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/MC-308155
No-one seems to be talking about this and the original twitter thread doesn't seem to have gotten much traction so I'm hoping that maybe Phoenix can shine some light on this. This whole issue really just seems perplexing to me. Surely Mojang realises that making people tired of hearing the same 5 tracks over and over is a little counter-productive..?