This stupid problem has been driving me crazy. I made a slightly different temp solution in case you or someone else was interested. This problem only seems to happen for me when I close the side menu, so I just added this to each page's constructor.
//Ionic displays the backdrop by adding inline opacity and transform styles, so just overwrite these
var backDrop = document.getElementsByClassName("backdrop")[0];
//Hide it
backDrop.setAttribute("style","");
//Fail Safe
backDrop.setAttribute("onclick","this.setAttribute('style','');");
//Delayed override
setTimeout(function(){
backDrop.setAttribute("style","");
}, 1000);