Upon upgrading my 1.17.1 world, chests and shulker boxes in a specific area are all invisible. All (invisible) chests and (visible) barrels are entirely empty. This only happens within a specific area, other areas seem unaffected. I have gone back and forth several times and also back in time to older backups of the world, and it happens consistently.

Upgrading any world doesn't actually ask me whether I do want to upgrade - it just loads up the world, and afterwards in the world selection it does show 1.18 instead of 1.17.1. Shouldn't I be warned about the version change?

This seems related if not identical to MC-242731. Note that this only happens when loading up this 1.17.1 server backup directly into 1.18 without first loading it into a 1.17.1 local version of the game (see first comment).

For reproduction, here a wall of barrels can be found which all became empty, as well as a chest in front of it invisible:

World: http://www.airblader.de/world.zip

Coordinates: 200 / 64 / 454

I tried running Optimize World before opening it to no avail.