If you already have an idea what the cause could be, why don't you just try it out?
Create a backup, do what you think and test and if anything goes wrong you can always restore the backup
I guess I should've been more clear with my throught process and my findings. Like I said, I'm not familiar with java code or anything, so I wasn't even sure if my hypothesis was even correct. From what I saw in the logs, it looks like it's trying to load more chunks than the server can handle and wasn't sure if someone could tell me if that would even be my issue based on the logs, or if there's an entire different issue. But you're right, I can just give it a test myself this evening if there's no other findings someone can tell me.