Hi Pix,
What a deep dive we are getting ourselves into. You managed to get some noise out so surely we can get the right noise out. I want to completely rule out hardware as an issue first. From what I’ve gathered the button and the display you have gotten working. This leaves the Audio BFF and the speaker.
If you haven’t already can you try either the CircuitPython or Arduino examples. The Arduino scripts are said to have been tested with the QT Py RP2040 and the library has been updated in the last year for those boards so hopefully that won’t be too difficult. It may be easier than the CircuitPython example.
Could you also confirm that your SD card is still formatted to FAT32?
Was there another issue present with this section?