Changing Minecraft entity rendering distance

I’ve noticed that, on some various servers I play on, entities are not rendered even if I am a short distance away, like ~40 blocks. Other servers I play on seem to be capable of rendering entities at enormous distances. I don’t believe it’s a server performance thing, as some of the more higher-performance networks I’ve been on, like Hypixel, have this short render distance as well.

Is there a way to edit this distance? It’d improve various aspects of my gameplay.

possibly related: yesterday, when setting up a small Spigot server on my computer, I noticed “view-distance” (or a similar name) in the server.properties file. Is this the entity render distance? It most likely isn’t the regular render distance, because that’s easily changeable on clientside from player to player.