When the lazy conversation context initialization is enabled explicitly in web.xml, the conversation initialization observers do not get called at all, while conversation destruction observers do get called just fine.

I've seen

We cannot fire the event without knowing if the current conversation is long-running or not which forces us to determine that non-lazily.

And CDI spec 6.7.4:

The conversation scope is active during all Servlet requests.

So it figures that lazy conversation context is at odds with the spec, but that doesn't mean initialization observers should not get called at all. They should be called whenever a conversation is actually initialized.