This is not a MSFS problem, more of a mod issue. And not really that really. I have a number of mods and I use MSFS Addons Linker to manage them, as I am sure a lot of users do. There is one issue that slightly puzzles me - for some mods I cannot read the manifest.json file. MSFS Addons Linker cannot either. These are text files and should be able to be read with Notepad or something similar. With some mods I can read these files just fine.
I am guessing that this is some sort of permissions issue, although with Windows I cannot see how this is possible.
The FlyByWire A320nx mod is one such, for example.
You might ask why do I care? Well, I don’t really. But MSFS Addons Linker shows the version number of the mod, which is nice. It cannot do that for these mods that it cannot read the manifest.json file for. Please note that this is NOT a MSFS Addons Linker issue at all - I cannot read them either.
Same problem here , but with “Unreal Weather - Live METAR 1.7” . It might be related however to the latest msfs update however.
The FlyByWire A320nx mod seems to work.
I use the Addons Linker as well and its a great tool, however what you are experiencing I have examined and found to be caused by the developers deliberately changing the ownership of all files that have been loaded at least once by running the sim. The “big” issue is that this means that even third party purchased addons have their file ownership changed (locked). This seems to be only an issue with .json files.
I have not found a way to regain ownership of these files, so the immediate answer is to never let MFS get to them in the first place. Therefore if you install third party addons and you can’t prevent them from being installed in the default CF, make sure you don’t run the sim.
Move the addon out to your Addons Linker CF first. Otherwise the only way to fix any addon that has had it’s ownership “locked” is to re-download it or at least unzip it again if you have kept the original .zip file.