I don't know what I am missing here. I haven't touched anything, freshly installed mod and it ... doesn't do anything?
I tried queuing stuff up and such, adding removing ingredient dependencies etc.
Doesn't do anything.

Heres a list of my mods

  "name": "base",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "auto-research",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "AutoDeconstruct",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "even-distribution",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "PickerExtended",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "upgrade-planner",
  "enabled": true
},
{
  "name": "YARM",
  "enabled": true

I have manually did some research, desperately trying to "activate " the mod by some magic voodoo but i.. can't seem to make it work

That's strange. It certainly should work just out of the box.
The mod is not red in the Mods menu?
What happens if you press Shift-T, does the user interface for Auto Research appear?

Yeah the interface appears alright. Also it seems to be interacting because if i manually start a research and then press "queue only" or whathaveyou-else it stops the current research.

It somehow started working after a while. I don't know what caused it. Awesome mod by the way. It shows that you put a ****ton of effort in it... so much possible customization. That's the Good stuff