Dynamic Linker does not resolve symbol although the library is already loaded

I stumbled over the following problem in my large-grown project: I have a set of libraries which depend on each other and on external libraries. Of one dependency ("libvtkCommonCore-*.so"), there are different variants, which need to be used interchangeably. The variants have different suffixes ("libvtkCommonCore-custom1.so", "libvtkCommonCore-custom2.so" and so on). Thus I cannot link the library, which needs symbols from it, directly to the providing library. Rather I link the application of the library which uses it to the appropriate variant and then load my own library.

This approach generally works but fails under some circumstances and I'm a bit lost while finding out what goes wrong.

This situation is working: Sketch of situation 1 ("libA" needs symbols from "libvtkCommonCore". It is loaded at run time by the constructor of some static object in "libB" using a "dlopen" call with flags RTLD_LAZY|RTLD_GLOBAL. libvtkCommonCore* and libB were linked at build time to an executable)

This situation now ceases to work: Sketch of situation 2 (actually the same as before but complicated by the fact that libvtkCommonCore* and libB are linked to another library libC at build time. This library is loaded from an executable at run time using "dlopen")

I investigated the case by setting LD_DEBUG to "files", "symbols" and/or "binding" and study the output. It reveals that libvtkCommonCore* is loaded, initialized and kept in memory all the time and before libA is loaded. When the linked tries to resolve "SymbolX" in libA, it does not search libvtkCommonCore, although it did for other libraries which needed the same symbol.

Note: I use Linux (Ubuntu 20) with the recent Gcc and CMake. Both the executable in situation 1 and "libC" in situation 2 were built with the flags "-Wl,--add-needed -Wl,--no-as-needed".

I would be grateful for any hint how to continue debugging this issue.