I have come across a very odd behavior of Forge.
I use MultiMC 5 on Win11. I have created an instance with
Minecraft 1.18.2
Forge 40.1.41
LWJGL 3.2.2
jdk-17.0.1+12 (by Microsoft)
I have 233 mods in my mods folder and Forge refuses to ackknowledge the existence of 3 of them:
lazydfu-0.1.2.jar
vanilla-hammers-3.4.0-1.18.2.jar
vanillaexcavators-2.3.1-1.18.2.jar
Minecraft log (from MultiMC): https://pastebin.com/bdEdHD60
debug.log (truncated to first 3000 lines due to size limit on pastebin): https://pastebin.com/v02LnaGi
As you can tell from the MC log, these mods do exist in the mod folder and as you can see from the debug.log Forge does not even try to load them/consider them as candidates.
I have tried redownloading the mods, I have checked and reset permissions on all mod files, I have tried creating a new instance in MultiMC, I have tried using different Versions of Forge (oldest I can go is 40.1.16, newest I can go is 40.1.41).
Since there are no error messages (regarding the loading of these mods) I am pretty much out of ideas and hoping someone can point me in the right direction.