Datapacks kind of ruined the Java side. Instead of (metaphorically) "grass.colour = green;" now you have several layers of indirection to look up the mapping of block types to colours, in several real and virtual entity-attribute-value stores that shadow and inherit from each other, and the easiest way to make grass green becomes to write a data pack - with all the limitations of that, not to mention the obscure syntax (do you write "{"inherits":"dirt", "variables":{"colour":"green"}}" in stuff/things/blocks/grass/index.html.json?)

This is called the inner-platform effect, where in order to avoid programming in the original language, you invent a worse programming language. Apparently it used to be a big killer of enterprise software. It's also one of the reasons Minecraft needs ten times the RAM it used to. To be fair, we have fifty times as much RAM as we did when Minecraft came out, but wouldn't you rather have it put to use doing extended view distance, extended world height, and shaders?