Great your issue went away … and interesting. Maybe this was a Chrome issue (have not read the Release Notes).
After reading this Reply, I ran a ‘zypper up’ on this Leap 15.6 laptop and yes, I had a Chrome update waiting:
google-chrome-stable 140.0.7339.80-1 ==> 140.0.7339.127-1.
That’s a very very minor release, so my thought is other folks had the similar problem, which Google fixed. (I never had the issue on my 15.6 systems).
One thing I did BEFORE the update, I ran the System Monitor and noticed the 140.0.7339.80 version had an average CPU usage of about 8-10% … even at idle with two tabs (Gmail in one tab, Google Voice in other).
After the update to 140.0.7339.127, CPU usage at idle is <1% or so.