When I try to load my world in Minecraft 1.18 on the PS4 Pro it does one of two things. 1: It will crash. Or 2: It will freeze, either the game freezes or the process of loading stops (I don’t know because there is nothing moving on the screen that let’s people know if it doing anything, and the loading bar doesn’t count).
My world was 935MB, I was able to transfer it to my computer where it worked flawlessly. I then used a program to delete a large amount of chunks and bring the file size down to 476MB. After transferring it back to the PS4 it worked the first time I loaded it. I explored some of my previously loaded chunks and exited the world only to find that the file size was now 595MB, I had explored less than 1/20th of my chunks and the file had increased by about 25%. It will now no longer load the world.
This was never a problem when using the experimental features.