AirPods and frequent Bluetooth disconnects

I've seen variations of this question multiple times and the answers have been thus far unsatisfactory.

My AirPods connect to my Iphone 7 perfectly fine and sound great for a short while (5 to 20 minutes) and then they start crackling and losing connectivity before they disconnect completely. The noise is so unbearable that I usually remove them before they completely disconnect though.

I've tried reconnecting to Bluetooth, turning Bluetooth off an on, resetting the AirPods, rebooting the phone, forgetting the bluetooth device and then reconnecting and also updating the phone OS.

The way it works perfectly for a while and then degrades quickly makes me wonder if there could there be some kind of memory leak happening in the phone itself.