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.
You are absolutely the kind of person I'd expect to find using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It's good to see someone fairly reputable in the modding space over here.