My 2021 MacBook Pro restarts instead of waking from sleep

grtgrfx wrote:

When I leave my Mac, it eventually goes to sleep. Fine. But when I wake it with the mouse or keyboard, it doesn't resume where I left off, it loads all the startup items one at a time and launches opened apps as if it was rebooting. This takes up to thirty seconds. Note, there is no startup chime. I understand signing in again, after all password lock on sleep is the standard behavior for a Mac, but this doesn't seem normal to me.

Try a SafeBoot How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

does a quick disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, including dynamic loader cache, font cache, etc., third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled.

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.