Honestly, golems needing players to spawn seems like a bug, as villages are independent from the player.
That only makes sense if we were talking about normal mobs, but, for instance, piglins can spawn from portals in a tickingarea, which makes sense considering that its spawn is independent from the player. So should golems do.
It is horrible in playstation 4 as well. It is imposible to explore or even travel with the elytras arround the world. Chunk barriers appear really fast and travelling long distances is just anoying because of this glitch.
I haven't seen improvements since 1.17. I think solving this should be a pryority for next versions.
Ok, thanks
Villager breeding is another example of mob generation that can happen without a player close, and it honestly seems more similar to spawning golem than to spawning cows, for example.
At least for me, it seems that while coding it, they used the same code as with other mob spawning and didn't notice that it should not be affected by the player distance from the village. Seeing it as a normal feature, and not only as a technical player, if there is a zombie with a name tag or with can pick up loot enabled in a village loaded by a tickingarea, golems should be able to spawn in order to save the villagers since those zombies won't despawn and will still be able to kill them.