Throwing in my $0.02 here: I've had two instances where this happened (one in 1.20.6; the second in 1.21.0), both while flying with an Elytra and dying due to kinetic energy.
I hit a cliff face: 100% of my inventory just disappeared.
I hit a tree: most of my inventory survived except a few things that were actively equipped (sword, elytra, leggings, etc.); those few things instantaneously disappeared.
My thoughts are that when the items are being scattered in the environment, some are being placed into occupied blocks, which results in instantaneous despawn. For the cliff incident, that just happened to be ALL of my inventory; for the tree incident, it seems to be just what was actively equipped in my inventory that happened to be allocated to an already occupied block (either log or leaves).
maelstr0m
Throwing in my $0.02 here:
I've had two instances where this happened (one in 1.20.6; the second in 1.21.0), both while flying with an Elytra and dying due to kinetic energy.
I hit a cliff face: 100% of my inventory just disappeared.
I hit a tree: most of my inventory survived except a few things that were actively equipped (sword, elytra, leggings, etc.); those few things instantaneously disappeared.
My thoughts are that when the items are being scattered in the environment, some are being placed into occupied blocks, which results in instantaneous despawn. For the cliff incident, that just happened to be ALL of my inventory; for the tree incident, it seems to be just what was actively equipped in my inventory that happened to be allocated to an already occupied block (either log or leaves).