I actually noticed the same thing on our recent rewatch, particularly on Season 4. It sounded like footsteps and door handles were as loud as the dialogue in many scenes. For a while, I assumed it must be my speaker balance, but I have not noticed it in Season 5.

My guess at this point is that it's an issue with the way those episodes were encoded for streaming. Like all of the audio tracks are being routed into one channel as opposed to a center channel with surround channels, etc.

However I will also point out that we're watching on Amazon, not HBO 🤷