[hobofan]

Java is for the modding user-base. If they would kill that, there is a good chance that the whole Youtube/Twitch creator ecosystem around the game dies, and with that it's popularity.

Bedrock is more performant and more portable across platforms (e.g. on consoles where you couldn't mod anyways).

[NeveHanter]

It won't die. Its not a problem to skip auth checking if at some point MS tries to use kill switch (hopefully EU would make that fully legal in EU if that's not provided by the company).

As for feature parity, there are mods backporting modern features back to 1.7.10.

Java is also portable to all the consoles, its just Microsoft did use that as an argument to try to kill the Java Edition. Nobody prevented Microsoft from adding bedrock like modding to Java Edition.

The only thing that needs to happen is the one single stable mod API for Minecraft Java Edition. The incompatibility between Forge, NeoForge, Fabric, etc. is terrible, but from what I know about some of the folks involved this won't happen as they cannot constructively discuss the matters.

[CursedSilicon]

Wrong kind of death. Taking mods away after a decade and a half of the game being modded inside out would massively reduce the creative scope of the game for players. It would become "boring" and die out