Jim, you are good!

"Automatically fill gaps" didn't do a thing for this issue.

but Adjusting push velocity to 4db solved it!

I deliberately didn't want to raise volume in audio editor manually, as this was a persistent issue. I wanted to find a solution, not a workaround.
I guess the drop in velocity played a trick on my ears.

While I accept this as partial solution and THANK YOU for sharing your knowledge, my question before I mark this as "resolved" is this:

Shouldn't a Push calculate proper volume level automatically?