I’ve already solved this problem. Solution is far from ideal but works if you don’t need to use your device for other audio-related purposes.
There was a conflict between ALSA and pulseuadio (that is being installed on Raspberry PI images with desktop since the beginning of the year) and pulseuadio was locking audio device for 1-2 seconds.
Removal of pulseuadio:
sudo apt -y purge “pulseaudio*”
makes the conflict impossible.
Anyway, better handling of such situation in Roon would be useful for the future and other use cases.