My SMP world has updated to 1.17 and so far we are able to get all the new blocks.
My underwater base gets Drowneds several times and I noticed it still drops gold ingots instead of copper ingots when killed by player.
Having seen all the snapshots, I am quite sure it was intended to be copper ingots. If not or it has been moved to 1.18, then consider this not a bug.
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Are you using any datapacks that alter mob drops (for example, a mob head datapack)? If so, you may have the same problem as MC-227802. In that issue, the reporter was using a datapack that changed the drowned loot table; the datapack's loot table had not yet been updated to include copper instead of gold.
See MC-226316, this is most likely caused by an incompatible data pack.