Is GPUsniffer.exe supposed to work with aerender.exe? If not, how to disable GPU with aerender.exe?

I'm trying to use aerender.exe and am having major issues with my GPU - it seems the latest version of AE (25.5) ignores the GPU settings in the project file.  (BTW thanks for letting us select something that has no effect, Adobe...)

The upshot is that my renders crash because the GPU gets immediately overloaded when I have a few threads rendering.  Historically, I've had to disable GPU rendering for this reason.  It seems that is no longer an option because, as far as I can tell, the setting is ignored.

But, supposedly, there is a way out: GPUsniffer.exe.  It seems AE runs this on startup and if it doesn't find the app then it disables GPU rendering, so you just rename GPUsniffer.exe to something else and that does the trick.  I confirmed this works in the main AE app - rename the exe and AE disables GPU rendering.  Hooray.  (Hey Adobe - how about you just make the setting actually have an effect?)

However... it seems this does not apply to aerender.exe.  So, is it supposed to?  If so, how do I get it to work?

And if not, how do I get aerender.exe to NOT use the GPU?