Dan proposed a new fix which seems to work in his case, many thanks for this extended troubleshooting, I will push this fix in after some more testing.
Fundamental issue seems to be that Percona Server either does not load all tables, or drops some tables, from dictionary cache. Dan's fix will pull the referenced table back in cache.
The problem still happens with the suggested fix.
Dan proposed a new fix which seems to work in his case, many thanks for this extended troubleshooting, I will push this fix in after some more testing.
Fundamental issue seems to be that Percona Server either does not load all tables, or drops some tables, from dictionary cache. Dan's fix will pull the referenced table back in cache.