Unexpected behaviors related to panel focus

I recently switched from an old MacPro tower running Premiere 2017, to an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with the latest version of Premiere, and I'm running into constant flaky behaviors related to what panel / window has focus. Here's some of the things I'm encountering:

1. When I have Premiere minimized, it pops open by iteself after a random interval and fills the screen again. HOWEVER, the app doesn't actually have focus, and I need to click on the window to make it ACTUALLY active.
2. No matter what window I had active when I minimized Premiere, when I switch back to the app, focus is always on the search bar of the Project window. This is quite annoying, as I'm usually hitting space bar to play from the source window or the timeline. Nothing happens, and my search field now contains a space, so my bins are no longer displaying properly. So I have to hit backspace to delete the character, then click on the window I was originally on, THEN I can finally hit play.
3. When I DO choose to do a search in the project panel, it always flakes out... because after I type 2 characters, FOCUS SWITCHES TO ANOTHER PANEL. So not only did I not do the search, I've now hit a bunch of random keyboard shortcuts. Great. I can always re-click on the search bar and finish typing what I started, but what a pain.
4. In the effects panel, if I scrub to change the scale of a clip, the moment I stop scrubbing it switches away from the effects panel to the footage source window. ie: I was looking at the effects panel, but now it's gone and I'm staring at the footage... which I probably didn't want yet.

There are a few other behaviors like this, but these are the biggies. Very frustrating, and I've never run into anything like them before. Could it be specific to the M1...?