Comment by piperswe

> - The community can fill in the gaps in multiple ways. Translation layers are available to connect to newer servers with older clients (ViaVersion), as well as with Bedrock clients (GeyserMC). Mods will almost certainly be released to reimplement the rendering engine in OpenGL or GLES. Renewed interest may mean OpenGL 2.0 compatibility mods could come back. Also, Mojang recently liberated Minecraft from variable name obfuscation, so modding will be easier than ever before.

And reimplementing the rendering engine for a different graphics API isn't even unprecedented, because there's a mod (VulkanMod) that reimplements the rendering engine for Vulkan already!