Dorico making Motu soundcard volume jump

It is not the issue of Dorico but of its bundled VSTAudioEngine.app program. More exactly, the CoreAudio2ASIO converter (included in the VSTAudioEngine.app bundle) is the one to blame, if you have met exactly the same issue with Cubase and Wavelab on your system.

I personally think that it is totally ridiculous and insane if an audio plugin app refuses to directly utilize CoreAudio on macOS. All non-Steinberg audio-production apps for macOS (incl. AVID Pro Tools non-HD) utilizes CoreAudio directly.