Wildfly 18 - drools 7.39.0-Final: Deploy app and get java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class - wildfly

Question

Been trying to migrate an application up to WF 18.0 and drools 7.39.0-Final.
Drools 7.39.0-Final is the last WF18 release.
One of our applications uses drools/kie.
I get errors like the following when trying to deploy it.
"jboss.deployment.subunit.\"policy-ear.ear\".\"policy-beans.jar\".component.CepRuleEngineHolder.START"
=> "java.lang.IllegalStateException: WFLYEE0042: Failed to construct component instance
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: WFLYEE0042: Failed to construct component instance
Caused by: javax.ejb.EJBException: WFLYEJB0442: Unexpected Error
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.drools.dynamic.DynamicServiceRegistrySupplier$LazyHolder"
From searching around I found that this can be caused by static stuff/constructors failing.
So I downloaded the source and as an experiment changed things as below. This fixes it.
This example below shows what I did for the KieServices class.
Note that the error above is for a DynamicServiceRegistrySupplier class, I tried to apply my change to that class, but it's a huge build and had some other issues. Before I chased that I wanted to ask if there's a better way to do this? It doesn't seem like I should have to do this at all, this is the latest published drools for WF18.
For KieServices, I changed this:
/**
* A Factory for this KieServices
*/
class Factory {
static class LazyHolder {
private static KieServices INSTANCE = ServiceRegistry.getInstance().get(KieServices.class);
}
/**
* Returns a reference to the KieServices singleton
*/
public static KieServices get() {
return LazyHolder.INSTANCE;
}
}
to:
/**
* A Factory for this KieServices
*/
class Factory {
static private KieServices instance = null;
public static class LazyHolder {
public LazyHolder() {
}
}
/**
* Returns a reference to the KieServices singleton
*/
public static KieServices get() {
if ( instance == null) {
instance = ServiceRegistry.getInstance().get(KieServices.class);
}
return instance;
}
}