On the flip side, the code that he originally wrote would never scale to a billion dollars. It was wildly inefficient. Someone with a bit more experience as a game developer, someone a bit senior if you will, was necessary to turn the idea into what it is today.
Wildly? I'm sure the code might be inefficient in many ways, but there have (as I understand) been performance improvements such as in chunk loading and map generation.
> performance improvements such as in chunk loading and map generation
True but the general game loop is still (wildly) inefficient; hence the multitude of performance mods (Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore, ImmediatelyFast, etc.) that are considered basic mods for anyone wanting to play the game without dipping down to tragic fps.
All of that functionality could (and should!) have been folded into the Minecraft source years ago. But Microsoft didn't buy Minecraft to give people a good experience - they bought it because it generates a non-trivial amount of money from things like Bedrock IAPs, merch licensing, etc. Updating the games is just a necessary evil that keeps the money flowing.
(Bedrock, on the other hand, is much more optimised because, IIRC, the core game was written in C++ targeting mobile devices and needed to be efficient to even work.)
