leaves randomly decay

I have been working on a mod for a long while now
this mod adds 12 new biomes with 7 new tree types to the game so far.
however, in these custom biomes the performance of the game is often very choppy.

I recently discovered that the entire biomes are full of sapling drops because leaves are decaying...
on further inspection all leaves generate with a distance value of 7.
if the distance value is 7, it has a 10% chance of disappearing.
only if it doesn't disappear will it actually check if its touching a log.
so for one, the trees have random holes in them, and for 2, the entire biome is covered in sapling item entities which makes the game stutter severely!

I have tried using a blockstate plugin to force the distance value to 1 instead of 7 OnBlockAdded, but the leaves that would randomly decay still do, and the remaining leaves will be stuck on value 1 and never decay, as if persistent.

has anyone got any idea how to fix this?
I even tried looking into the block code, to try and change the default distance value, but the only refference to blockstates was my own procedure being called.