Oh, so my “fixing” happened sooner than later and was accomplished by merely commenting out line 128 in owlcarousel.php:
/* wp_enqueue_script('js.owl.carousel.script'); */
Everything seems to work fine for me now (though it’s worth noting that I’m building carousels from json, not using any of the built-in methods for creating carousels, so YMMV if you’re doing it some other way).