I found out today that Microchip discovered an issue in their MCP23017 chip where under certain circumstances the I2C SDA signal may become corrupted when the chip’s GPA7 and/or GPB7 pins are used as inputs. For this reason, they updated the datasheet to reflect that those pins should only be used as outputs.
I'm hopeful that a silicon revision is in the works, but I wanted to alert the library maintainer in case they were unaware of the issue.