Resolved.
Cause: In-between version updates, chat-text size got set to "0"/"off". Took some digging around, but console output is now being displayed properly.
Also having this issue frequently after migrating 1.18 world to 1.18.1. Appears to be visual: had a chunk "not load" and zombie appeared to FREEZE on chunk border, but a few seconds later i started taking damage from invisible zombie.
@ Gabriel Pascal Johnson, does the bug exist if you upgrade from 1.17 or 21w44a directly to 1.18pre2 ?
World loading time is something like 5x the time it took pre 1.17
(your results may vary....mine have been garbage)
not a bug. belongs in suggestions.
not a bug. this is intentional. cats that spawn inside of a swamp hut are always supposed to be black.
uninstall old versions of java and uninstall minecraft (make sure to backup your world saves.) Then reinstall minecraft. Try 1.16.4, or 1.17.x to make sure minecraft runs with the fresh install on the current graphics card drivers (creating new worlds for these tests is advisable). If that works, then update minecraft to the 1.18.2 release and try that. If that fails, we can isolate the issue further.
(also, don't reinstall java during these tests. minecraft should run on the bundled java runtime)