They weren't talking about gameplay, they were saying minecraft as a whole. Don't know about you but how a server is moderated is a pretty big part of how you play on that server
Ehhh, my main argument would be that the game is constantly getting easier, and another less subjective reason it's gotten worse would probably be that they don't devote enough time to optimization, so the game runs worse every update.
It’s always interesting that people say this, since I feel the exact opposite is happening. Not necessarily an increase in difficulty per se, but a massive increase in time commitment. It feels like compared to say like 1.12 it takes nearly double the amount of hours to achieve the same progression and way more time to do everything else. Like making farms has become mandatory for gameplay just to not waste insane amounts of time trying to actually play the game.
Now that I think about I might make a general post about this.
What I find interesting is the fact that if you go to earlier versions like Alpha and Beta, it is actually much harder to do stuff, eg much less forgiving worldgen, harder caves, slower movement, lack of automation, and worse gear, which progressively gets easier until 1.13 or so when time investment spikes, but the difficulty stays the same.
See that's actually valid criticism. While the game was never hard to begin with, the piss low difficulty became even lower.
But when people say "Minecraft is ruined" they usually talk about silly inconsequential things like chat reports, slower/smaller updates and 2 pixels not being included.
The optimisation part I 100% agree with but I feel to fix this we need to overhaul the game from the ground up
The gameplay itself is getting easier and easier. I personally like a challenge in my games and even hard mode is getting too easy. There are also a lot of new systems that you practically never see use. Starting from the whole conduit thing to the newer archeology, it just doesnt seem worth it to put that much effort to get so little.
the chat reports and skin reports are just other problems. Not making up the bulk of the problems but still there.