Minecraft's Caves & Cliffs update (1.18) made the game prettier but impacted Java edition's performance. Many players use Optifine or Sodium to play; should optimization be in the base game?

Caves and Cliffs was so influential that it had to be split into two updates. It was such a game-changer that Mojang could not put everything into one patch, instead splitting it between versions 1.17 ...