hmmm, There is a similar (but not exactly the same) behavior with SPI on APQ8096 where all reads are preceded by a single random byte meaning libvoxl-io needs to read one extra byte than expected and then discard the first dummy byte. However this happens under the hood here:
I've not seen such a thing with I2C. Have you looked at our VL53L1X driver for APQ8096? It might just work with your newer VL53L1CB sensors with small changes.
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/apq8096-rangefinder-server