Spigot still maintains some partial implementation of "tick skipping", a
practice in which the MinecraftServer.currentTick field is updated not
by an increment of one per actual tick, but instead set to
System.currentTimeMillis() / 50. This behaviour means that the tracked
tick may "skip" a tick value in case a previous tick took more than the
expected 50ms.
To compensate for this in important paths, spigot/craftbukkit
implements "wall-time". Instead of incrementing/decrementing ticks on
block entities/entities by one for each call to their tick() method,
they instead increment/decrement important values, like
an ItemEntity's age or pickupDelay, by the difference of
`currentTick - lastTick`, where `lastTick` is the value of
`currentTick` during the last tick() call.
These "fixes" however do not play nicely with minecraft's simulation
distance as entities/block entities implementing the above behaviour
would "catch up" their values when moving from a non-ticking chunk to a
ticking one as their `lastTick` value remains stuck on the last tick in
a ticking chunk and hence lead to a large "catch up" once ticked again.
Paper completely removes the "tick skipping" behaviour (See patch
"Further-improve-server-tick-loop"), making the above precautions
completely unnecessary, which also rids paper of the previous described
incompatibility with non-ticking chunks.
