When I'm playing on servers, most of which are located far away from me in the US or someplace else, I always get massive lag spikes loading chunks.

Is there a way to set a different render distance for the server, or such that the client only requests a smaller render distance before using fake chunks?
E.g. With a server render distance of 6 chunks (as is I think(?) the default on most servers) changing a setting so that the server thinks my render distance is 3 or something, and then bobby defaults to fake chunks for the other 14 chunks or something if I had 16 chunks render.

TLDR: New option for different max render distance, e.g. 16 client render, 2 server, so that only render of 2 is sent to server, remaining 14 are fake chunks.

No, the server is in control of sending chunks to the client.
And while the client does send its render distance to the server, I've yet to see a server which actually respects that (if you find one, then I may consider adding an option for this, but without the server cooperating, such an option would be useless).