@perfectionaq's answer worked, but is not desirable for obvious reasons. I tried explicitly setting the baslineOffset - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsattributedstring/key/1526427-baselineoffset to 0 and that worked perfectly without any side effects.

One thing you could do is use an analytics provider that offers an analytics data ingestion API via REST. This way you could make a simple network call using URLSession to track basic events, rather than using the entire mobile SDK/library. An example that I'm familiar with is Mixpanel