wvffle
Ah cool no worries, it's not the biggest problem in the world so I can live with it for a time 🙂
Generally I just use a pinned tab which I use, but typing in the URL directly for my instance then clicking artists gives the problem still.
When I get the problem it looks like this (no parameters in the URL):

As you point out yea it works when you change the artist order twice, and then that made me think of directly visiting https://funkwhale.domain.xyz/library/artists/?ordering=name
which works fine.