Another factor in this is that crafting stations don’t use any resources if no one is around them. When there’s no players around a given station, the server doesn’t allocate any resources to processing the queue; when a player does come in range, the server notices and “catches up” to where it should be in the queue depending on how much time has elapsed.

This is also the source of the bug where sometimes you’ll put something in a crafting station and it “insta-crafts” an entire stack of whatever. It’s existed forever, but of course, no one really complains about that particular issue.