In one of my applications I want to use non-blocking retries while manually starting the @KafkaListener as described here.

Adding an @EventListener like this one:

@EventListener(ApplicationReadyEvent.class)
public void startKafkaListener() {
    MessageListenerContainer listenerContainer = endpointRegistry.getListenerContainer(LISTENER_ID_FOO);
    if (!listenerContainer.isRunning()) {
        log.info("Listener not running - starting.");
        listenerContainer.start();
    }
}

seemed to do the trick, however now I am facing the following problem: once I disable the autoStartup of my @KafkaListener non-blocking retries seem to stop working.

I have created a sample project that shows this issue.

Am I missing some post-processing here that enables the retries?