Enabling Lazy Initialization Breaks Kafka Listeners Using Spring Cloud Kafka Binder

Question

I'm working on a Spring Boot 3 application where I've been trying to optimize startup times by enabling lazy initialization. However, after making this change, I've encountered an issue with Kafka listeners. Specifically, the listeners stop receiving messages.

I attempted to explicitly set the @Lazy(false) annotation on the Kafka listener components, this hasn't resolved the problem. While it appears that the listener beans are created at startup (as expected with @Lazy(false)), they still do not receive any messages from Kafka.

I use Spring Boot 3.2.2 and I load my Kafka listeners from the property file like this:

spring:
  cloud:
    config:
      allowOverride: true
      overrideNone: true
      overrideSystemProperties: false
    function:
      definition: >-
        listenExample;
    stream:
      bindings:
        listenExample-in-0:
          destination: example-topic
          group: example-group
          consumer:
            use-native-decoding: true
      kafka:
        bindings:
          listenExample-in-0:
            consumer:
              enableDlq: true
              dlqName: example-error-topic
              dlqPartitions: 1

The component:

@Component("listenExample")
@Lazy(false)
@RequiredArgsConstructor
@Transactional
public class ExampleListener implements Consumer<Message<String>> {

    @Override
    public void accept(Message<String> message) {
        // do something
    }
}

Thank you in advance for your help!