Loud background noise

My son has an iPhone 12 Pro with AirPods Pro and I also have an iPhone 12 Pro. The mic sound quality with his AirPods Pro is not good in general (worse than his wired Apple earbuds), however the way that his AirPods pick up background noises makes them virtually unusable for calls. If he walks over a freeway overpass the traffic noise it picks up is unbearable. If he is in a coffee shop, the background noise will get louder and louder until I can no longer hear him at all. It's as if the mic gain is increasing to amplify the background noise. Today I was talking to him and after a few minutes all I could hear was the background music blasting and he said it was playing at low volume in the coffee shop.

There are many posts about this issue. I have read various forums and we have tried turning off noise cancellation (which doesn't make sense but we tried it anyway), disabling ear detection, switching microphone to always right AirPod, resetting the AirPods,... Nothing has fixed it yet.

After suffering with poor sound quality on our Pixel 2's I thought the iPhone 12 would be much better; but, in fact, the iPhone is way worse if there is any background noise!

Apple, please fix this!