Meta fields are escaped too much (too many slashes)

I was having an issue with some meta fields not being searched correctly. When the value has a quote mark in it (e.g. “5’10” or “5’7”), the query ends up adding like six extra slashes by the time WP_Query runs (“%5\\\\\’10%” and so on). I’ve solved this in my copy by changing this (starting at line 427):

$query['meta_query'][] = array(
	'key'     => $name,
	'value'   => $metadata,
	'compare' => 'LIKE'
);

to this:

$query['meta_query'][] = array(
	'key'     => $name,
	'value'   => stripslashes($metadata),
	'compare' => 'LIKE'
);

This works, giving me all the results I expect for those metafields, but I’m wondering if I’m introducing a security vulnerability here. I think the query is escaped later down the line, which is what’s causing all those slashes, but is there any reason this wouldn’t be safe?

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-ultimate-search/