I haven't played Minecraft for many years but I'd argue the way it's supposed to be play is an old version from like 10 years ago with a tech modpack like Tekkit. Back then, there were open servers where communities built cities with no grief prevention because people trusted each other.

To be fair, there are still servers like that. Last week I was on the largest ReIndev mod server, beautiful architecture for as long as you walked, none protected by any means

Fully unprotected is a lot of work for the mods when the occasional griefer does find the server.

Easier to have some form of land ownership/permission system for builds.

When I was a kid, I ran a public server with Logblock and anticheat but no other plugins, so it was basically vanilla for anyone who wanted to play nice. People loved it.

Public servers with e.g. coreprotect for rollbacks are still around. Most people play nice, but when somebody doesn't their acts can be reverted without impacting anybody else. It's a lot of fun if you can get the right team of admins/janitors to keep it running.

Maybe, but back in high school, it was very hard to find those. Especially with things advertised as "vanilla" or "semi-vanilla" actually having tons of crap installed.

I assure you Notch did not mean to make a game of RNG reverse engineering.