I play on my own private dedicated server, using the vanilla JAR with a vanilla client.

This world has been active since the release of 1.17 and I have been actively playing in the world for nearly 200 hours. Within aproximately 200+ blocks from my base, I found two chickens, aproximately 8 blocks away from the chickens, there was a huge pile of chicken eggs on the ground roughly occupying a single block, as if they'd all been dropped at once. When I collected them, there were 193 eggs in total.

I had previously explored that part of the world, but it's not a part of the world that would have been chunkloaded very much.

Nobody else plays on my server (it's whitelisted to me only). I have no explanation as to how those eggs were in the world.

The chickens were probably too far from my base area in the world to have been chunk loaded, server has a view distance of 8 blocks, chickens were 200+ blocks away from my base area (but if they had be chunkloaded long enough for the eggs to be laid by the chickens, surely they'd have de-spawned too?)