There's good reason they forego realism in this aspect. Imagine watching a scifi movie where every scene where the camera is in vacuum is dead quiet.

If you were designing a cockpit and wanted to relay positional data to the pilot, 3D audio would be a great way.

So my head canon is that the sounds are generated in the cockpit, for the benefit of the pilots.

Gotta put the willhelm scream in there, but make it not too obvious.

But don't change it so much the nerds can't recognise it

Have you ever seen the "the cheese is under the sauce" meme video?

The mics are in the spaceship.

What about lasers going pew pew?

To me the greatest dealbreaker is that they brought aerial flight mechanics into space. It makes no sense

The sound of spaceships come from the same place the music comes from

In my mind we are just hearing the radiation, not directly but some system is converting x rays to sound, etc

maybe their thrusters are burning with air, or some other catalyst medium that propagates far as vibrational energy and we're hearing that?

Hot take: I'm fine with this. Film, TV and games are audio-visual mediums, they depend on the sound just as much as the image. All the awesome space battles would lose from being dead silent. No sound, no music. You're in a vacuum, where's the music coming from?

The silence of vacuum should be used when it would enhance the drama and impact of the scene, not for a slavish adherence to realism.

Interstellar and For All Mankind benefit from the silence because they're not about the excitement of space, they're about the drama of space and the characters. In those, space is a character all on its own. Star Wars and Star Trek are about the adventures and the action. Space is just the setting. And in that context, silence is jarring.