Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not playing Minecraft, but this has fascinated me from afar. AIUI, Microsoft has two teams on two different continents essentially developing two very similar but subtly incompatible versions of the same game. Funky. Do they share any code or formats? Are the client/server interoperable? Does the C++ one even have a server implementation?
I recently got into Minecraft due to kid reaching Minecraft age. I keep meaning to write an intro for technical parents, because it's very confusing at first. The original was written in Java, and people decompiled and reverse engineered it almost completely, so there are tons of mods that reach in and change things deeply. They then created MCPE (pocket edition) which was a "cut-down mobile edition". That evolved in…
You can also rent a JAVA realm. And if you outgrow the realm (want to use mods), you can download the world and run it with a "real" (modded) server.
Modded servers are another rabbit hole...