Sure Minetest and Mineclonia are great but they aren’t anywhere near as developed or fleshed out as Vintage Story. In a couple of years maybe I will agree, but at this point Vintage Story is a fully fledged Minecraft-like with a complete gameplay loop and Mineclonia isn’t. Minetest/Mineclonia are super cool though the names are awful ughh.

But why would I play (and mod) Minetest, when I can play Minecraft which has way bigger community, so there are more interesting mods?

Because on a longer term scale even if Minecraft has way more mods currently there are very serious issues and limitations with the Java edition. There are also serious performance bottlenecks with the Java edition. Microsoft also doesn’t give a shit about modifying and building out Minecraft in a way that facilitates modders doing new interesting things, they are simply incapable of valuing modding given the nature of a cancerously large company like Microsoft. The point is to sell merchandise and push kids onto the Bedrock edition, that is the only lens through which the people with the power to make decisions at Microsoft will ever perceive Minecraft.

Long term, successful mod packs on Minecraft Java are on a dead end road. Maybe not everyone can see that dead end right now, but disgustingly huge and powerful companies like Microsoft only ever make one kind of choice in these kinds of situations, the dead end is inevitable for modded Minecraft. Maybe it won’t happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t happen for a couple of years but it will happen and the fact that Vintage Story and Minetest exist chugging along with small but vibrant modding communities will be the only thing that saves the creative potential of the genre at that point.