I have an smp server that started on 20w18a and then we switched to 20w19a the next day and we were unable to find any nether fortresses and usually we have good luck on finding them so I decided to investigate and found that it literally doesn't spawn on the server but in a singleplayer world with the same seed there was a nether fortress
Make sure the server doesn't have structure generation turned off. Also, try locating a fortress on the server using /locate.