After update in early Jan 2022: autologin no longer working

I have a Manjaro running on VirtualBox. Until recently, the system booted to my personal desktop without requiring a login. In the early days of this January I ran a long list of updates that were offered at that time. All seemed well. A message said that the system needed a reboot for the updates to become effective. I clicked the button “restart now”. After the restart, I got my personal desktop as before.

But then, I shut down the machine. When I restarted it later, I no longer got my desktop, but a login box asking for my password. After typing it in, I finally was on my desktop.

But why this change? I find it annoying having to type in my password after every boot. Is something broken? How can I get back to the old behavior of an auto login?
I will warmly welcome any advice, but please consider: I’m not familiar with Manjaro internals.

Which desktop environment are you using? kde or xfce or gnome

Using xfce. And I can reproduce the situation, using a backup of the pre-2022 installation.