I often remove small sections from videos, and it then is important that the audio at "both ends" that are joined fits together.
My workflow is to mark a section with 'i' and 'o', and then cut and join with shift-x.

What I would like to do is "play the result", i.e. preview a short section around the future cut part, excluding the marked part. I can play the marked part with CTRL-SPACE, but what I would like to do is preview the result *excluding* this section. Is this possible?

you can suggest sometimeng like that (maybe related to the "zone" that is also yet available) adding a function to play timeline excluding the zone-in / zone-out interval... (and also a function to CUT the zone-in / zone-out interval)..

well.. try to request this here: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/issues ( write on the tile the word "SUGGESTION" )