Animals and villagers dissapearing after save

I have a 2 year old world I play on that is very important to me. I waited a week to play with the 1.18 update in the hope that bug fixes would be finished and all was going well but just now when I logged in my cats, mooshrooms, name tagged bat living in my storage area, name tagged villager, my turtles, horse, the paintings in my museum and one of my chickens had all disappeared. (I play solo no one else can get on this world) Thankfully I kept the backup it made when I updated so I can try again which I did and managed to recreate the bug. It seems to happen when I save in my storage area, which is below my house by about 15 spaces on the y axis where the cats and other live stock are, and when I log in all animals including two name tagged ones are gone. This includes the bat in the storage area where I saved who is name tagged. Ive heard that others are having problems with NPCs disappearing but not to this scale. I should also note that my striders, who are a good distance from my base, did not disappear. I have no explanation as to why. Please see if you can address this issue as I want to continue to build in this world with the new expansion but having this threat hanging on me every time I saw makes it too scary to continue.