Before the version, 1.17.0, within the latest of 1.16.221, the sound engine felt perfectly fine on what is needed to render sounds. The sounds now when loading a creative world with tons of stuff regarding command blocks and whatnot within the 1.17.0 update creates sound lag, where the sound stops suddenly and then plays again. In the previous version, this never happens, and it is within a 4 simulated chunk distance. Most of my command blocks are inactive and are not rendered, which created the first issue I had with the sound engine, but I fixed that over 4.5 months ago.

Even in a safe area, where there are no command blocks, the sounds still lag, even with little to none running as well. I'm not sure if it is related to command blocks, or it's just the optimization for 1.17.0 that is making the worlds I have done this. It is pretty annoying to deal with since I have a world that heavily relies on these command blocks to function properly.

I cannot post a screenshot, but I can tell you that 80% of my command blocks are not rendered unless used within a tick area, distributed amongst districts so that they don't heavily cause client lag. Most commands rendered are not much. And even before 1.17, the sounds never lag, but the only stutter I got used to.

I even have another world with the same issue regarding the sounds, but it has more commands running at a time, but it still displays the same sound lag. I'm not sure if it's affecting across all versions, but I can say that this is affecting heavily, more so on the client-side. There needs to be a hotfix regarding the engine so that creators do not get frustrated trying to work out the issues.

How often does this sound lag occur?

More heavily now, it happens randomly across different world areas, or even across various worlds. 1.16.221 didn't have this issue this big, but it only happens when there are too many commands running simultaneously, which is around over ~500 at a time. Now even with little numbers of commands running, it lags pretty often.