I celebrated a bit too soon. Removing the field codes globally caused some issues (I only had a handful of cross-referenced tables and figures and no citations/refs), but it was still an issue. I started again and went through the field codes individually and removed the cross-referenced fields, which solved the issue without introducing new issues.


This is not an ideal solution because some documents have tons of field codes, which would likely make this approach impractical. Although I plan to avoid cross-referencing again moving forward, in some cases I'll likely be forced to, so it would be helpful if anyone has ideas of how to solve the problem in the OP more elegantly, especially in documents with many cross-referenced elements.