It’s going to depend on the official, and whether it is witnessed. As someone else mentioned, littering is littering, and the reason the rules exist to begin with is to keep the area clean, so that the RD can get permits to hold the events year after year, if people are throwing their gel wrappers all over the place rather than in dedicated liter zones, it’s hard for the RD to effectively clean up the course, so that residents don’t lose their minds with a yard full of cups and waterbottles.
That being said, most officials are probably more sympathetic for the accidentally ejected bottles and may show mercy, versus something intentionally chucked when it’s outside of the littering zones.
For example at a race on the weekend, where I was chief bike official, but where there was rain and a stretch of exceptionally bad road, I didn’t give penalties for ejected bottles or visors even though I witnessed several, but if I saw someone pitch their bottle, they would have gotten dinged. Conversely at a race the weekend before, an athlete pitched a bottle 10m after the end of the littering zone, right in front of me on the moto, and he got a littering penalty (and much like your case, there were tones of bottles and food wrappers in the 500m or so after the littering zone, but none of them were witnessed by officials, only a couple of people got caught for littering, because they weren’t listening carefully enough to hear the motorcycles behind them, before pitching something…).
As a responsible member of the community, I won’t litter outside of designated areas on the course, and if I did accidentally drop a bottle, and could safely retrieve it I would, regardless of whether there was or wasn’t an official around.
The one exception to this is the lost cycling shoe at dismount… this used to be a penalty, but at least in the case of the ITU, this has not been a penalty the last 3 years… the reason being, that an athlete turning around and running back to dismount, while other athletes are streaming in (especially while turning, and their bike being perpendicular to athlete flow) is far more dangerous than the stray shoe… But many athletes don’t realize this and try to go back to get it… at many recent races where I have been at the dismount line and I see a shoe slide out (as long as it’s accidental) I’ll yell to the athletes to leave it, but some still turn and create the larger hazard. If ever they took out a group of people while doing this, they’d probably end up getting a penalty or a DQ for impeding other athletes because of the dangerous behavior (this speaks to the caveat I mention above about being able to safely retrieve the bottle, without creating a dangerous situation, such as being in a blind corner, or the sort)…