Webclient bean forms circular references

Question

I have few microservices in my project, as is standard i am using discovery server and track distributed tracing using zipkin :

    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
        <artifactId>micrometer-tracing-bridge-brave</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.zipkin.reporter2</groupId>
        <artifactId>zipkin-reporter-brave</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.micrometer</groupId>
        <artifactId>micrometer-registry-prometheus</artifactId>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>

As per documentation

If you create the WebClient or the RestTemplate without using the auto-configured builders, automatic trace propagation won’t work!

so i need to use autoconfigured WebClient.Builder, however since i have multiple instance of microservices, i need to use LoadBalanced on webclient.

The autoconfigured builder does not contains @LoadBalanced annotation (WebClientAutoConfiguration.class):

@Bean
@Scope("prototype")
@ConditionalOnMissingBean
public WebClient.Builder webClientBuilder(ObjectProvider<WebClientCustomizer> customizerProvider) {
    WebClient.Builder builder = WebClient.builder();
    customizerProvider.orderedStream().forEach((customizer) -> {
        customizer.customize(builder);
    });
    return builder;
}

So i used:

@Bean
@LoadBalanced
public WebClient.Builder webClient(WebClient.Builder builder) {
    return builder;
}

However this throws:

The dependencies of some of the beans in the application context form a cycle:

    ┌─────┐ |  webClient defined in class path resource [...//WebClientConfig.class] 
    └─────┘

I could probably make some wrapper/adapter for WebClient/WebClient.Builder to fix this, however that seems like overkill for such problem ( since it contains lots of methods )

What could be causing this? I am using

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.5</version>
    <relativePath/>
</parent>

for parent of my parent pom. Thanks for answers.