Filed #4861, hopefully enough to fix the issue.

I excluded case with "something", it does not seem to work in 2.17 as well.
@Saljack Lemme know if you think we should include "something" case.

@Saljack quick note: please do not omit getters and setters for brevity -- their existence is important wrt property introspection. Reproduction should be faithful to actual use case.

Actually, I am not sure this should work quite the way that submitter expects.
Automatic (no-annotation) detection is meant to only work if there is EXACTLY one constructor (including no 0-args constructor). But given there is 0-args constructor, that should instead be used.

Note, too, that Jackson does not select multiple properties-based constructors; they must resolve into to one. So there is no dynamic choice from { } into 0-args and others into 1-arg.

In this case it does not seem to matter as the end result is about same.

So I guess I do not quite understand why auto-detection works.

@JooHyukKim plain "something" case cannot work (and should not work) without explicit delegating Creator so no it should not be tested for.

But support can be added with something like

@JsonCreator
public static Foo valueOf(String str) {
   return new Foo(str);
}

or @JsonCreator(mode = JsonCreator.Mode.DELEGATING) annotated Constructor.

But would not be auto-detected.

Sorry for confusion. Let me try to explain. I use ConstructorDetector.USE_PROPERTIES_BASED be cause I do not want "something" to be deserialize into this object (it is with other ConstructorDetector options because one arg string constructor is used).
I added "something" just to show that anything works if there are multiple constructors and I do not expect (or I do not want) to deserialize it.

My expectation is that Jackson uses no args constructor if there are multiple constructors and there is no @JsonCreator annotation. The whole problem is that you cannot deserialize into this class if you use ConstructorDetector.USE_PROPERTIES_BASED.

@Saljack Ok, good thank you for adding more info -- that's how I think things should actually work. I am not 100% sure why auto-detection kicks in, need to dig deeper.

Hmmh. Ok, no, for 2.18 this was changed slightly so that an implicit properties-based Creator MAY be detected not just if there's no 0-args constructor but also if ConstructorDetector.USE_PROPERTIES_BASED is enabled.

In POJOPropertiesCollector 718:

        // One more thing: if neither explicit (constructor or factory) nor
        // canonical (constructor?), consider implicit Constructor with
        // all named.
        final ConstructorDetector ctorDetector = _config.getConstructorDetector();
        if (!creators.hasPropertiesBasedOrDelegating()
                && !ctorDetector.requireCtorAnnotation()) {
            // But only if no Default (0-args) constructor available OR if we are configured
            // to prefer properties-based Creators
            if ((_classDef.getDefaultConstructor() == null)
                    || ctorDetector.singleArgCreatorDefaultsToProperties()) {
                _addImplicitConstructor(creators, constructors, props);
            }
        }

Ok so what I think is specifically needed, to address the failure is this: we can only auto-detect Properties-based Constructor if (and only if) it:

• Has either Injectable definition OR implicit name for EVERY parameter

This is being checked for multi-parameter case, but not for 1-parameter.
I will add that check.

There will still be auto-detection, however; I will not change that -- but in this case without parameter-names module it won't kick in.

Thank you for reporting @Saljack !