Meet the new forge, same as the old forge. Forge has been forked, with the majority of forge's developers moving over to the fork, NeoForge. They hope to implement some major improvements come 1.21 and maintain compatibility with Forge mods on 1.20.
@stephfinitely@Astrealix honestly just use the fabric version avoid whatever forge is doing and enjoy yourself on fabric my server runs fabric with 1.19.2 create mod works fine is fun all you need is the fabric loader, fabric api mod and the create mod and that's basically it