Thank you @@unknown, it actually helped (as of openjdk8-jre 1.8.0_202-b08).
I think that some announcement that older java versions are not usable any more would not hurt.
Same with 1.14.3-pre1
I have also tried to move world spawn point to another clean location. I even deleted chunks at that location. 1.14.2 still hangs.
So my guess is that actual chunk data is unrelated to the issue, it is rather some global metadata of the world that is causing the trouble.
Same with 1.14.2 release
Well in my case, running 1.14.2_Pre-Release_3 server with --forceUpgrade --eraseCache (or --eraseCache alone) just caused the server to hang at "[04:38:26] [Server-Worker-3/INFO]: Preparing spawn area: 0%" at zero cpu usage and no response except hard-killing the java process.
Downgraded to 1.14.2_Pre-Release_2 and it started just fine. However the light seems to be fixed because 1.14.2_Pre-Release_3 upgraded chunks before hanging.
I'm not asking for a help. I do not have performance issues.
The issue linked by the mod is not related to the problem reported. My report is not about the watchdog.
There seems to be a scenario when the server hangs, it is a bug in minecraft.
I'm not sure why .txt files are initially related, but existing ops.json was destroyed while updating from 20w08a to 20w09a.
It now contains a single square bracket ("[").
Should I add a number of ops to ops.txt and restart the server,