Comment # 1 on bug 1146022 from Johannes Meixner

First and foremost:
In general issues with HPLIP's proprietary plugins
do not belong to us (i.e. to openSUSE) because the whole
HPLIP proprietary plugins stuff belongs to non-free software
where only those who made the non-free software can provide
real help and support, cf. the sections
"Printers with non-free driver software" in
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Printer_buying_guide
and "Third-Party Scanner Drivers"
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_Scanners
so the responsibility for the bug lies at HPLIP upstream, cf.
https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/about
where you could report this issue.

Nevertheless some blind guess what the root cause could be
(I do not have a HP device that needs any kind of
proprietary driver/plugin/whatever so I cannot reproduce
anything with HPLIP's proprietary plugins):

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/hplip-keeps-looping-at-plug-in-installation-4175647505/#post5958568
reads (excerpt, long lines shown wrapped here):
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
hp-setup[31158]: debug: Either
 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane/libsane-hp2000S1.so file is not present
 or symbolic link is missing
hp-setup[31158]: debug: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane/libsane-hp2000S1.so
 library status: 0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

As far as I can imagine
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane/libsane-hp2000S1.so
is a library from HPLIP's proprietary plugin
(likely a proprietary library for scanning)
which uses a directory that is wrong for openSUSE
and other distributions (but that is right for Ubuntu)
so it seems this needs to be fixed in HPLIP's proprietary plugin.