Entire villages systematically despawn

[Context: The indicated version on my PS5 is 1.017.000, not sure about the hotfix thing in your dropdown list.]

All the villagers in all my villages (up to six now) systematically disappear after the second or third visit. I’ve had this situation happen systematically. I visit a village, then take note of its location. When I come back later it will either be in the same state as it previously was or every single villagers will have disappeared. So far this happened to six villages, some close to my homebase some very far away. I understand that villagers can be attacked but in the past I’ve had these events and often only part of the villages die, and also it never happened as systematically as it does right now.

Also, in one of the villages, since the issue had already happened 3 or 4 times already, I restrained half of the villagers in their houses until I found the time to secure the village (I was still assuming it might be possible that it was just villagers getting killed). When I returned the first time the villages was alright, the locked up villagers were still locked up and the other half of the village was going about their day. I returned a third time and the entire villages was empty, even the locked up villagers. I’m pretty sure something is wrong.

One thing that I was doing at first, is that I played on a realm but I didn’t want to pay for PS Plus, so I played locally on my PS5 than Replaced the world on the realm and then I played from the Realm on my PC. When I wanted to play from my PS5 again I would download the world from the realm, play, and replace it on the realm when I was done. I stopped doing this after the disappearing villagers happened the first few times, but it still happened afterwards. The villages where I locked up villagers was OK when I stopped uploading/downloading to/from the realm, but they disappeared anyway.

Most likely unrelated, but maybe it is, I have had numerous tamed wolves disappear also. They were sat down in my home base in a secure location, no monster could spawn in or target them from this location. One of the wolves was named and it also just disappeared eventually.

I started my world recently, a few weeks before the spring update with the new skins for pigs, cows and chickens and the burning bushes and cacti flowers. I don’t think there had been any disappearances before that update, but I cannot be entirely certain. I can say that at least most of the disappearances happened after the update.

I guess my main hope is to provide visibility, to see if this happens to other players so that the issue can be fixed because it is annoying. I don’t expect my game can be saved though. Also I’d like the issue be fixed so that when I repopulate a village or find a new one it wont disappear again.