IIUC in #1962, we're just throwing the AutoFactory processor on the classpath and relying on javac to discover it there.
Our docs advise the same: https://github.com/google/auto/tree/main/factory#download
We should instead use annotationProcessorPaths, as we've documented for AutoValue for a while, as recently updated in #1957. (Also: AutoFactory has provided a separate annotations artifact for a long time now, so we can change the classpath to use that.)
I may make an attempt at this, depending on how the rest of #1962 goes and how hard it looks.