I found MinedHype SMP and it is a friendly long term public survival server that has been around for years with the same owner. It is on Minecraft 1.21.11 and it aims for a mostly vanilla kind of survival.
There is no whitelist and it says no pay to win. There is also no money economy plugin so shops are run by players with item trades instead.
Grief protection is done with claims and grief is allowed if a spot is not claimed. They also use CoreProtect to help with problems.
The Overworld and Nether are meant to never reset. There is no set world border or even a set spawn and players spawn randomly within the first 40k blocks. You can use /rtp to get a random spot and then set a /home.
It supports Bedrock and Java cross play and it has a web based live map. There are free events with prizes and a public shopping district you can teleport to with /tpshop.
