The main thing I am critical of are the chat reports, but that was essentially Microsoft’s doing.
Back when the likes of 1.9 and 1.11 came out, they added things people they wanted (elytra, firework boosting) but ended up screwing over how the whole game worked. So I can see why they’re being careful with harmless small changes. It’s also a 16 year old game, the fact that they’re pushing free updates for a one off £20 purchase is excellent. The game is also already pretty good as it is. The mob vote was a nice idea for community engagement(although they could have been more clearer on how the losers would be added later on). I think people are FAR too toxic that they aren’t receiving free updates for a £20 game that is already absolutely stellar, and that many have poured thousands of hours in already, if not tens of thousands. I’ve been playing it for over a decade now, and I am quite happy with the direction it is going. People are ungrateful that they aren’t getting huge game changing updates every year. Things like that need to be well balanced and ironed out to prevent a disaster like 1.11 happening again.
Essentially, they added functionality where you can report messages and get people banned globally from all Minecraft servers. The problem was that they had stuff on there like griefing and swearing and “harassment” (which is very loosely defined, a server I ran had someone complaining it was harassment that a player made a second joke about them in the context of the game. Six months after the first one.). Stuff like that should be managed by the server admins, not mojang. There are good reasons for such a system I think, such as child grooming, doxxing, or inter-server harassment.
Also, Minecraft servers are all privately run except for realms.