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As someone who's developed a similar app for Android, I'm actually a bit surprised that they have to resort to such workarounds in the first place.

I agree. They labeled it an elegant solution. More appropriately, I believe, it is an elegant hack.

On top of that, it's liable to be rejected by Apple as an abuse of public APIs.

Just last week there was an article on HN about a guy who got rejected for using the VoIP background API for an IRC app. Which actually is bending the rules a lot less than playing a silent audio file on loop in order to claim to be an audio client.

They were already rejected for playing a silent audio file. But this post mentions they have re-submitted the app, allowing users to play their own audio files. So this is 100% legitimate.