Audio duration sometimes changes to near-zero in Safari - ios

Question

I am encountering a strange issue on Safari, both on MacOS and iOS. Initially it seemed like audio would sometimes just not play, but not emit any errors. After adding much logging I found that when when I call audio.play() the audio.duration property would accurately reflect the duration of the clip. The pause and then ended events will then almost immediately be emitted and, after that the duration for the same clip is suddenly somewhere between 0.001 and 0.003 seconds.
I am retaining a reference to the audio element and reusing it to play the same audio multiple times. It almost always works the first time, but after the first playthrough, on about 50% of subsequent plays the symptoms described above will present themselves.
The code where I play the audio is below:
// In the constructor for the class managing audio playback:
this.mediaElement.addEventListener('pause', e => {
console.log('Media paused', this.mediaElement.duration); // This shows the very short duration if the audio did not play
});
// In the function in the class that plays the media.
try {
await this.mediaElement.play();
console.log('Media is playing', this.mediaElement.duration); // This shows an accurate duration
this.state = Playable.state.PLAYING;
} catch(e) {
console.error('Playing media failed:', e);
if (e && e.name === 'NotAllowedError') {
ErrorHandler.playbackNotAllowed(e);
this.state = Playable.state.PAUSED;
return;
} else {
this._fail(e);
this._fakePlay();
}
}
As you can see, I'm not doing anything strange or complicated here. So far I haven't been able to figure out why the duration would change in this way only after playing the audio. Is this a known bug, or is there something I may be doing that could cause this behavior. The closest thing I can think of is that sometimes I will set the currentTime to 0 if I need to start playing the audio from the beginning, but that should not change the duration.