So I did a bit more research into this in order to answer the question. It turns out that the AudioKinetic Wwise plugin’s default behavior is to start a monitor service on game and editor development builds so that an audio engineer can remote view and control the sounds that are occurring at runtime.
This is useful, but confusing to be sure. If you are using the Wwise plugin it will remove this functionality for shipping builds only. Your solution handles this, but in case you wanted to know the (very likely) cause, there it is.