While debugging this issue, I found that the `MetamodelGraphWalker` might be to blame here. It looks to me like the detection of circular associations does not work correctly, because the `MetamodelGraphWalker` thinks that it detected a cycle in the metamodel graph (see above) when it is actually a directed acyclic graph.

See here:
https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/3a2ab40314c1f66456cb3481ed31f029a1814c01/hibernate-core/src/main/java/org/hibernate/persister/walking/spi/MetamodelGraphWalker.java#L146

And here:
https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/3a2ab40314c1f66456cb3481ed31f029a1814c01/hibernate-core/src/main/java/org/hibernate/persister/walking/spi/MetamodelGraphWalker.java#L303