Jeff

Yes

Yes you are right!

Then it's not my fault, it's the same for everyone on the PS4, right?

So when I download a package, the display shows as normal...MB are downloaded and when it is finished, the message download failed appears and this happens again and again

I have the same issue. Server version is 1.21.102 and the Xbox and iOS clients are version 1.21.101. I can’t play on my server.

This is happening in my single player world for both 23w13a and again today in 23w14a.

I have lost all of my worlds progres because I was exploring before the update and it took me so long to load I was killed by a skeleton when I spawned in. To make matters worse for me, the game did NOT respawn me at my bed and instead sent me to the default spawn location. My base is very well hidden and I have coordinates turned off, which means I have most likely lost over 60+ hours of progress permanently. I am not angry or anything (after all, I probably should have made a backup before updating but my monkey brain didn’t), but it really sucks to lose so much progress because of an update that was so majorly delayed that it was split into two updates for “quality assurance purposes”. As a developer myself, I understand mistakes like these are easily made and I have no hard feeling because of them but I hope this does not happen again because it sucks on a order of magnitude greater than any other.

Btw I was playing on an iPhone XR, so that may have something to do with it

Note: this is NOT just an Australia thing, I'm in Philadelphia (US east coast) and it happens here, though not every single time just half the time or so.

My complete speculation is it's a latency problem with the profanity-checker server, which would explain why it happens with all text and only on realms (since private and single player servers don't check for profanity). If it's latency related that would also explain why it is worse in AU/NZ since you're probably farther away from the server down there. Additionally I would further speculate that this profanity-checker server is likely run by a different team at Microsoft (the "Tay" team? They know something about profanity 😋) and Mojang may have no direct control over it, which would explain why this bug is "confirmed" but not fixed. 

I recently joined a realms server and it made me stop playing. For me this issue makes realms unenjoyable.

Thanks to Antho Foxo for posting the workaround.  It turned out that all of my hives and nests were in one chunk, and adding a single (hidden underground) hopper clock fixed the despawning issue.

I can repo it again after going and doing other things for a while in the game, this time the delay was 2-3 minutes before it started working.

Interesting, I left an item sitting in the anvil with the repair and name screen up and a new name entered for a while (a minute?) While entering that last comment, and eventually it showed the item in the output with the new name, and let me remove it and renamed the item. And now it seems to behave normally (without the delay) and I can no longer reproduce the problem.

If I use the anvil to merge two items and rename, the anvil does not show the new name, and the item was not initially renamed after I took it off the anvil, but after 10 seconds or so it took on the new name. However this only works for items that can be repaired on the anvil, other items cannot be renamed.

Repo is incredibly simple. Place any item on the anvil, enter a new name, there is no option to remove the item with it's new name. Philip included an image but I will add another one.

Just downloaded a copy locally, it behaves the same. I attached a picture of the setup, with no hopper below it works fine (except I have to manually unload the potions), but as soon as I place a hopper below the brewing stand it unloads the water bottles immediately. It does not matter whether the hopper below points at the barrel or not.

Followed the steps. Did not crash.

Need to get confirmation status changed to confirmed. Is there a verified way to reproduce this issue?

You're probably right. That a null check can be so catastrophic tho...

Could this be a ticking entity problem? I've seen ways to fix this on other platforms but not for worlds on BDS.

Did a package update too. Among them was this one...
libc6:amd64 2.31-0ubuntu9 2.31-0ubuntu9.1
No crashes since.