On the one hand, great; should hopefully mean the monkey-patching by mods isn't quite as fragile as it is once you get into a decent number of installed mods.
On the other, I'd assume this means that any official modding support is now stone dead and will never happen.
I haven't played minecraft in a fair while, but started with the alpha builds back when the Seecret updates were the most exciting thing going for the game.
> I'd assume this means that any official modding support is now stone dead and will never happen.
I was a bit surprised to read this because talk of modding support had been on the radar since notch days, it's wild to me that this hasn't happened yet.
I suspect Minecraft was large enough to support an effective modding community from the start regardless of official support, so that there was always some kind of third-party unofficial mechanism (ModLoader, then Forge, then now Fabric and Quilt). Mojang probably punted it down the priority list because of that, or didn't want to impose a structure and kill those ecosystems. Technically speaking, Java is reasonably easy to plug stuff into at runtime, so that was never a barrier.
The original issue with official modding support, from my perspective, has always been a legal one. But the Mojang EULA explicitly allows modding now. So I would see this decision as one in a long line of decisions by Mojang to both normalise the legal relationship with modders, and beyond that giving a "thumbs up" to the community.
It's been dead already. There's datapacks but it's been pretty obvious they're not going to make an official modding API. I think they realised that the community modloaders are already really good.
So instead they have been structuring the code in ways that help mod development, and have been talking directly to the devs of mods and mod loaders to try and reduce friction with Minecraft updates.