Solution Found!
Apologies for the delay in providing an update.
As the original poster of this thread, I can now consider my issue resolved.
After my last post but before chewitt requested the pastekodi informations, I even upgraded to a nightly build, but I still had no success.
So, I decided to download the official 2025.01 release of LibreELEC 12.0.2 for RPi4 again and copied it onto a separate SD card, to be able to reproduce the state of my original post. My initial plan was to gather the data that chewitt had requested.
After booting from the new SD card, I left everything at its default settings (language set to English – in my previous attempt, I had changed it to German) and went straight to the audio settings after the initial setup.
And there it was – the "Audio Passthrough" section was immediately visible in the standard view (which I previously did not have).
So, I set PT to enabled and activated all formats supported by my AVR in expert mode.
After that, I copied the entire "audiooutput" section from the guisettings.xml of this fresh installation to my problematic installation (which was running the nightly build).
Now, even the nightly build supports Audio Passthrough!
However, I noticed something strange:
The Audio Passthrough toggle was enabled, but it was visually different (somewhat "inactive").
I clicked on it again, and after that, it changed to its normal color and was fully "active".
I’m not sure what the exact cause of the issue was in the end.
Nevertheless, thank you all for your help, especially chewitt!
Best regards,
Frank