Very weird behavior with loading back a scene, I isolated the problem but still can't make sense

[peak matrix]

I was encountering some weird problems while loading from a scene to another and then back, so to check my sanity I made a minimal reproducible example of the problem.

My minimal example is the following.
Two scenes, that are visually distinguishable, they both have at their root a copy of this script, with "next_scene" set to the other scene.

extends Node2D

@export var next_scene: PackedScene = null

func _process(delta: float) -> void:
    if Input.is_action_just_pressed("space"):
        print(next_scene)
        get_tree().change_scene_to_packed(next_scene)

Expected behavior:
I would be able to navigate from one to another back and forth.

Actual behavior:
First load goes well, then going back fails because "next_scene" is said to be null

This happens no matter which scene I start with, proving that it isn't my setup that is wrong.
I tried to implement my own scene manager that would instantiate and queue_free() nodes instead, but I get IDENTICAL behavior.
At this point I'm losing my mind as I've been at it for a few hours .

Very weird behavior with loading back a scene, I isolated the problem but still can't make sense

[peak matrix]

The packed scenes in each scenes referring to one another results in cyclic dependencies, which breaks everything.
My solution is to use a Resource that stores the path of the scene instead of PackedScenes.
That way, if I change the location of a scene, I only have to change it in one other place.

[earnest merlin]

hey! thanks for this - I'm having the exact same problem and it is baffling. Will try your solution, although it makes me kind of sad since export packedscenes are so nice and tidy

cyclic dependencies make sense. Thought they changed the interpreter with gdscript 2 so that this wasn't a problem anymore. alas.