I'm using the 1.16 branch; I don't know whether it applies to others as well. It does this irrespective of the initial load chunk option, which I don't think is related to the issue. This is a very serious concern because a lot of things depend on spawn chunks being loaded. For example:

• Some people like to build iron farms there when lag is not a concern
• Some people use command blocks in the spawn chunks rather than things done by data packs
• Some people use the spawn chunks to do chain chunk loading up to their perma loaders such that they get jump started after a server restart

It may very well be that this is a VanillaFix optimization and that it is intended but if this is the case, there should be an option to disable this as it makes VanillaFix essentially unusable for technical players in many scenarios.

I had this issue a while back. Turning bug fixes option off should fix the issue. It's still an issue with vanillafix 1.12.2 1.0.10-150

You can enable spawn chunk loading by setting disableInitialChunkLoad in the config to false

wait does that not work?

I’ve pushed a fix that (hopefully) should work. If it doesn’t, please let me know