Alright, it looks like I finally got it working!
Your suggestions made my code less ugly as well but my main issue was positionViewAtIndex not firing consistently when pressing the back button.
I had put it in a Qt.callLater at someone’s suggestion a while ago and did not realize this might be the culprit. Outside of a Qt.callLater it also didn’t fire consistently but I’ve now put it in a Timer and that seems to work all the time 
Thanks for the help!
(I’m also now using a unique ID to find the index although the model shouldn’t change between the push and pop calls.)