And there's no other known way around this currently?
Same for me and my friend.
I just experienced the same thing. Iw as trying to level up the cartographer for item frames and every time I would level up to the explorer map my game would freeze sometimes for a couple of minutes.
I'm playing on an experimental world that was made in 1.17 and then played again 1.18. I don't recall anything dissappearing before I loaded the world in the new version. As of now, my fully enclosed villagers (who are very much stuck and safe in their enclosure) have been dissappearing seemingly at random when I AFK at my skeleton farm for extended periods of time. The farm is far away enough that the chunks aren't loaded (I believe), and when I afk, my screen stays open on the world.
I was unable to re-breed my villagers without adding new beds, even if I broke the ones attached to missing villagers.