I am thinking before 1.19.1 when chat reporting was added. 1.7 to 1.12 seem to have less requirements to run for lower end pcs. Its just some chill fun and not pvp focused so being newer than 1.9 shouldn’t matter. I am thinking 1.15 maybe since it added bees. I guess its a compromise between how well the game runs on lower hardware and what features we want.
Edit: I have decided to go with 1.19 that way we still get frogs/froglights with out having to deal with chat reporting being misused.
As I said in the other comment, another option is the open source Luanti (formerly MineTest). It is a base “engine” for which you can install different community made games. There are games that attempt to copy Minecraft as completely as possible (with survival mode etc.): https://content.luanti.org/packages/?type=game
Voxelibre and mineclonia seem promising.
I will have a look into that as well. Btw while I was on minehut to check if they supported classic cube servers I noticed something odd. They have no reject cookies option which is illegal.
I just tried it myself, I can also not reject them. That’s not OK, worthy of a separate post even!
I think we need to let one of the big mc youtubers like phoenix sc know about this to shed some light on it. Also just then when I was searching about minehut I found it is now owned by gamersafer which is related to mojang/microsoft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY0lBr0TX_w I am not sure if not being able to reject cookies predates that but being owned by a company that is parternered with microsoft/mojang instead of just some random shady company means they should know better than to allow this illegal stuff to happen.