Works well with a few problematic checkpoints here. Thanks!

And after removing the check for external files, it's working even for a few alternative VAEs that always gave me black outputs. Any reason for not enabling the scaling factor for SDXL every time?

The VAE conv scaling may slightly affect image quality and generation speed in some cases, so I prefer to avoid using it whenever possible.
I’ve added a --force-sdxl-vae-conv-scale option to force-enable conv scaling for the SDXL VAE, which should meet your needs.

And after removing the check for external files, it's working even for a few alternative VAEs that always gave me black outputs.

FWIW, vae-conv-direct also seems to be enough to avoid the issue for the problematic VAEs (although it's far slower on ROCm).