Could this work with the no barrel mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nobarrel)
or have an option added to not need empty barrels in the recipes.

I can have a look for sure, what is not working exactly?
In theory if that mod edits the auto-generated recipes it should work fine without even needing a dependency, because my mod doesn't edit the same fields.
You might also want to try similar mods like this one but I don't know if it will fix your issue.

I guess the one I used was changing recipe type or something which caused the barreling machine to not produce anything.
The suggested mod works. Thanks.

Awesome, that's good to hear, have fun 👍