We discovered that adding DiscordSRV [Build-1.21.3] to our [1.16.5-R0.1-SNAPSHOT/git-Paper-526] server prevents xAntiAFK's placeholders from being parsed by PAPI.
Validated with /papi parse and causes issue architectsmp/k8s-gitops#106
c.c @bloodycoffin

I checked this through and what I believe probably happened you /papi reloaded and that causes xAntiAFK's expansion to stop working because it hasn't set persist() to return true. And when you were testing removing DiscordSRV you probably restarted the server, which would've re-enabled the xAntiAFK expansion. Either way I don't see how this is DiscordSRV related at all

That may be why we didn't catch this, /papi reload is in the startup script

We've been scratching our heads over this for the evening & it turned out to be that simple; thanks @Vankka