This happens to me also. Not everytime, but enough to make it annoying. Why would the write be deferred? The disks are spun up anyway to read the new tracks. I don't think that the time before yanking is relevant - I've had this happen 20 minutes or so after selecting a new playlist.
I suspect that the player attempts to write the information, sometimes fails for some unknown reason and then forgets to retry. Whether this write failure is due to a new bug in an intentional change in the code or whether it's an existing race hazard that was previously unencountered due to other reasons is unknown.