VoiceOver no longer registers ellipsis?

Voiceover used to be able to recognize an ellipsis (…) and read it out as a pause with about the same length as the comma. I’m pretty sure I had to set this up manually at first in verbosity/punctuation, but it seemed to work just fine up until recently.

Now I can’t even get it to replace “…” with “ellipsis” for the readout, so clearly it’s not just my personal settings, something is up with the actual recognition of that specific punctuation, I think.

For example, a situation like “one… two… three” is read out much too quickly as “one-two-three” instead of having any pauses between the words. And this seems to persist regardless of verbosity/punctuations settings.

I always use the narration voice setting, since I mostly use it for reading books or writing in pages/notes, so maybe that has something to do with it?

I’ve read that some voices process punctuation differently, so I’ll try experimenting with different voices and settings, but Siri voice 5 is the only gender-neutral voice, so I’m very reluctant to switch, haha.

I also want to note that this issue seemed to coincide with a distinct change in tone that I noticed overnight two or three months back, implying the issue must be connected to whatever tweaks they made at the time. (I don’t hate the new tone, but I definitely preferred the old version, and I have a gut feeling hastily-implemented AI may be the culprit, just saying… I could be wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised…)

While waiting for Apple to address the issue, if anyone has any suggestions for fixes in the meantime, that would be much appreciated!