If you are playing on Paper or a fork of it like Tuinity or Purpur, you might be able to stop the symptoms of the bug by disabling the "async chunks" feature in paper.yml.
The bug message still appeared a couple of times, but there weren't any problems like extreme lag and the server crashing for me (which was the case before).
But I would still advise you to make a backup in case it doesn't work for you and you need to go back to 1.16.
@Karim Rivera Load a backup, the bug decreased my TPS to 1.5 within 10 minutes, then the server crashed.
Restarting didn't help, so I had to load a backup.
Can someone with a test or backup world check if it works with the --forceupgrade flag?
@TechRoot
Mojang being Mojang. Their attention to the server community has really been lacking in the past years. The only reason people can run bigger servers is third party software that optimizes vanillas horrible server performance and fixes bugs Mojang won't touch allthough they have been known to be an issue for months or even years (dupes etc.).
As I already said, if you are on Paper (or a fork of it), try to disable the async chunks thing. Otherwise, you will probably have to wait until either Mojang fixes it or a different solution is found.