Webprofiler interfering with behat test scenarios

After installing and enabling webprofiler I begain to experience what appeared to be caching problems with my Behat scenarios. I run a drupalvm instance with behat v3.1.0 and firefox for testing. Prior to installing I had a series of tests that ran fine. After installing, the tests began to fail for what seemed like cache problems. However, I did not experience the same problems when testing the same scenarios manually from both Firefox and Chrome. After several days of troubleshooting I was not able to identify the core issue, but as soon as I uninstalled webprofiler the tests started passing again.

One of the common problems I experienced was that custom entities were not getting inserted when they were supposed to. It was as if the behat test was using a previous user (that had already been deleted) and that user's content was still active in the database.

I also had cases where messages were not displaying, or were not displaying with the correct content for the scenario.

I'm using Drupal 8.3.4.