I mean, you could listen to samveda chants from different parts of India and see the pronunciations are very audibly different...
Your kind of hot take about Sanskrit is somewhat common.
Your kind of hot take about Sanskrit is somewhat common.
Relatedly, I went to a spoken Latin event where I (an American) spoke Latin with an Italian man. His pronunciation and mine were wildly different, although we could understand each other. Neither was all that similar to the academic linguists' view of what our conversation would have sounded like thousands of years ago, though I guess his vowels were generally closer and my consonants were generally closer.
People retaining ancient languages for liturgical and scholarly uses are generally not that great at preventing the pronunciation from shifting, and I think that's true across the board. ("Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant." -- Henry Beard.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Sutras#Arrangement
So while a present-day understanding of classical Sanskrit grammar could be derived fairly directly from his work, that's still not any guarantee that you would pronounce Sanskrit just as Panini would have.
A moderately imperfect analogy is that while Jews have been carefully learning to read, recite, and copy the Torah for thousands of years -- including reading commentaries, which, while nowhere near as systematic or thorough as Panini, elucidate lots of grammatical issues -- there still emerged huge, systematic regional differences in the pronunciation of particular Hebrew letters, even in liturgical use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_Hebrew
among several others. The people using each pronunciation were often incredibly sophisticated in their religious scholarship and incredibly familiar with the underlying material, but they definitely didn't (and don't) pronounce it the same way.
Modern linguistics has been able to find evidence for comparing these pronunciation variants and also understanding their histories, and I believe something similar is true for Sanskrit pronunciation.