No natural hostile mob spawns

The server me and my friend are playing on is not spawning and hostile mobs naturally, meaning just as I’m wandering around. Passive mobs still spawn, and hostile mobs still spawn due to events, from spawners, trials, etc. just none naturally. We switched the difficulty quite a few times within a few hours and it clearly messed it up. Double and triple checked that “domobspawning” gamerule is set to true, server difficulty was set to normal in server settings and in the in game console, we logged off for extended periods of time, still no natural hostile mobs.