Seems as if you (or payara) are using jersey which seems to use yasson per default. In my environment things were similar and with quite similar problems (why does yasson keep stepping in?). The solution in my case was to make the following library available:

            <dependency>
                <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.media</groupId>
                <artifactId>jersey-media-json-jackson</artifactId>
                <version>3.1.6</version>
            </dependency>

No idea why though Jackson was configured no error/warning is displayed anywhere (at least I did not see anything). Thanks to @Julios_Rodmax who pointed into this direction.