Minecart with hopper disappears if not attended after some time

i made a farm where a hopper minecart is in a continuous loop on some rails and activates a detector rail every round it does on those rails, but after some time, the minecart with hopper is just gone, there is no way it could escape or anything because this is literally just a loop made of rails, minecarts and hoppers are quite annoying to have to keep recrafting too... me and my friends are often all away from the location of the farm at once so the simulation distance only really reaches the farm a small amount, but i was thinking maybe the hopper minecart is despawning because nobody is near it, but that would be a pretty pointless feature, so i assume this is a bug...