Safari keeps closing all my tabs and reverting to start page

Every time I go to a different app and come back, even if it’s only been a few seconds, every window I go to closes all the tabs and goes to the Safari start page the moment I select it. I can’t even use the “reopen closed tabs” feature to work around it because the tabs it’s closing don’t always show up in there. 

So far the only “fix” I’ve found is keeping an empty window open, going to that first, and then closing that empty window, and then opening a new empty window every time I want to go to another app, but that isn’t going to work long-term and I have tabs that I can’t afford to lose to this bug. 

This is happening on my iPad 10. I just installed the latest version of iOS and it’s still happening. I’ve checked the settings, and before you ask, no I can’t restart Safari or clear the cache and website data because that would delete all of my tabs.