Intermittent audio pops/clicks appear in imported videos in Final Cut Pro

This only started happening recently - last few days. Audio pops/clicks appear in imported videos, most recently in vids shot from my Pixel 11 Camera. They don't appear in the original video. I first started noticing this a few days ago when I imported multi-track game capture videos into FCP (which, btw, import without this issue in DaVinci Resolve). But the Pixel 11 Camera imports are going onto an entirely new library and project with default settings so not sure why the issue would've transferred.

I thought it might've been audio clipping but it still happens when the audio is isolated to that clip and the volume meter peak is way below 0.0 dB. I understand that it can happen due to sample rate mismatch, with FCP favoring 48 kHz - which is exactly what the source video is. No audio modifications are enabled.

The issue seems intermittent; on the same clip and without any changes, sometimes the pop appears, occasionally not, and volume of the pop may vary. Unsure, but it seems likelier to disappear if I keep the project open and wait 10+ minutes without edits. However, I don't notice any background tasks being performed during this time (i.e. in the Background Tasks window/icon). And as soon as I make a small edit to anything in the project, it's back. I can't wait 10+ minutes each time. In fact, even in those rare instances where the pop has disappeared from the timeline, if I then immediately export without further edits, the pop often returns in the export.

If I do a test by cutting out basically everything around the pop bit and just export that, it seems often no issue appears in the export, but when I add back the surrounding material, the pop is back.

Troubleshooting steps:

Background Render - was already off.

Reset FCP prefs via Opt+Cmd while opening FCP.

Clear FCP's cache (including all Render Files), export directly after this without edits.

What else should I try before migrating to another video editor indefinitely? Something that ideally isn't along the lines of extracting+converting audio / etc which is inconvenient and will take up much more space and time across multiple projects.

macOS 27.0, FCP 12.3.