When Minecraft came out, it was hard to understand, not that good looking and only really catered to nerd gamers. There was no recipe book, no cute animals, no lush caves to explore, just an unforgiving Day-Night cycle and few, very creepy caves.
But those days are behind us. Minecraft is now considered a kids game and someone who bought the game as a grown up when it still was a grown up game now face ridicule and are "second class gamers" in the eyes of the developers imo. Not to speak of bedrock edition (eww) with its microtransactions and dumbed down UIs.
I remember making a paypal account for the express purpose of buying it after reading about it in a tech magazine (on paper - can you believe it?).
What do you think are currently games that are not focused on children and have great potential?
Sure, the Mojang team itself tried to make it more accessible, which is a very reasonable thing to do for any game really. I know there are many games, where a wiki is mandatory, buta game should explain itself, so I understand why they did that.
However (although I haven't really followed it) the community still seems to be pretty much the same as before to me. If anything the stuff they archieved is even bigger, than back then. Stuff like Distant Horizons or the Create Mod could simply nit have existed back then.
What I'm getting at is that you don't have to play vanilla and there are more possibilities than ever before (including lots and lots of modpacks and servers, which definitely do need an external wiki)