Can we use curved spacetime to measure the one-way speed of light?

This is related to Measuring one-way speed of light with gravitational lensing and Measuring the one-way speed of light with a black hole?

The idea is to shine a beam of light from a clock towards a heavy mass, like a black hole, in some manner such that the curvature of spacetime around the mass is sufficient to "bend" the light directly back to the clock. That is, to send the light along a self-intersecting geodesic using a sufficiently curved spacetime. Note that in this case the source and the detector are the same object, so no clock synchronization is required. Hypothetically, this should measure the one-way speed of light.

None of the given refutations from the similar posts on this site are convincing. Here are some of the main refutations, as I understand them, and my counter to them:

(1) In being curved by spacetime, the light is actually changing direction, hence this is not the one-way speed.

To my understanding of General Relativity, the light travels along a geodesic; that is, a curve such that, ignoring technicalities of Differential Geometry, its tangent direction is constant. There is no reflection or acceleration. So in this sense, how can the light with a constant tangent direction be said to change direction? One might say that the path deviates from a straight line in Euclidean space, but given that spacetime is not Euclidean, has no extrinsic structure, and has no global notion of direction, this is the only definition of straight or "one direction" that makes sense. Thus, either the light does not change direction and is "one-way," or we need to be clearer about what exactly we mean by "one-way" in the context of General Relativity.

(2) Such an experiment would be impossible or impractical.

I think some posters were saying this because the original questions implied that the clock would have to be at the event horizon of a black hole, which is of course impossible or impractical; however, I don’t think such an extreme closeness to the black hole is required. Given that the photon sphere of a black hole, where light orbits in a circle, is outside of the event horizon, shining the light at some distance outside of the photon sphere should be sufficient to curve the light back to the clock, regardless of the distance of the clock from the black hole (see my rough illustration). At the extreme, we could place the clock directly on the photon sphere, which should be theoretically possible. Regardless, the question is not about practicality, but whether the one-way speed is theoretically measurable.

Update:

Essentially what this argument boils down to, I think, is that the average speed of light along a single self-intersecting geodesic may differ from the average speed of light along a non-geodesic self-intersecting path, which is always c. Put that way, however, it does seem a little ridiculous. It is hard to see how the anisotropy of the speed could be defined in such a way as to be consistent with this pathological case.

Presumably, we could approximate a single self-intersecting geodesic with a non-geodesic path arbitrarily closely, so, logically, the average speeds over each path should be approximately the same, i.e., c. Furthermore, how would the "preferred direction" of the speed of light behave around a black hole, for instance? Regardless, I still think this experiment does actually solve the problem for the given notion of "direction". Though the problem is usually posed in the flat spacetime of Special Relativity, with a global notion of direction, so the apparent unanswerability of this question should be seen as a limitation of Special Relativity only, which is then solved by General Relativity.