Persistent Mob Issues

Ive been running paper servers for a few years and one of the ongoing issues ive had is persistent mobs -- particularly endermen and zombies. Once they pick up an item, they just live forever. Zombies were particularly bad because other mobs will die in caves, or players will leave blocks behind, and when you run a server 24/7 for months or years, it starts to add up. We run mostly vanilla, and it is important for players to be able to have persistent mobs. My solution was a script that runs once a day that teleports every zombie variant holding a specific list of items (mostly trash that they would find in a cave) and teleports them into the void. And players know to keep a persistent mob, they need to be holding a craftable item. I went with this route vs /kill because that just left more items on the ground. This works. it's not the end of the world. but it feels like something there should be a plugin for, to just treat zombies holding rotten flesh or cobble, or an endermen holding a block of dirt as not persistent. Does anyone have a more elegant solution than a script thats almost 250 lines long lol