They target Bedrock for this, and I strongly suspect once it starts bringing in extra money they will essentially kill further Java edition development.
Then, by making Bedrock available to people who paid for Java, they would give a hassle-free way for players and modders to try it, and many will probably stick to the latest version.
I do hope, if this scenario comes about, the community will keep the Java version alive by maintaining feature parity, but there’re fundamental issues where some features might not be easily backported on Java due to performance limitations, plus community fragmentation as different modders try to backport same new features in different mutually incompatible ways.
The "Minecraft Pocket Edition" (MCPE) code that became Bedrock predates Microsoft's involvement by over three years. Bedrock is actually Microsoft's effort to unify versions, eliminating the separate legacy console editions and providing cross-play with PC, mobile, and other console users.
Java remains separate because the consoles will never run Java and the modding community that exists around the Java version just can't be replicated on the Bedrock codebase. If it weren't for mods I guarantee Java edition would be dead.
My biggest issue is the amount of friction when creating a new Microsoft account for a child. I have to walk through other parents in creating a MS account for themselves (if they don't have one), then how to make a child account with a username, then finding and ticking a bunch of checkboxes to allow online play, then launching Minecraft and signing in with the new child account. It's way too many steps with email verifications. It's >30 minutes. In just my circle there's several parents who gave up and sadly their kid can't play with their group of friends. People outside of tech don't have patience for that crap. This is all outside the fact that each console has their own form of friction in allowing kids to play online.
C'mon Microsoft, you can improve the new user process. Just make an optional in-game wizard asking parents a bunch of questions so kids can play ASAP. And if the issue is that it wouldn't fit in with the one-size-fits-all MS accounts used for everything else, then flag the "wizard-built" accounts as incomplete so parents can go through making a 360 account another day. Damn metrics.
For some reason they locked my completely unused Microsoft account, that was created for the sole purpose of migrating my Minecraft account to, due to "unusual behavior" (or "activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" if you go by the error message instead of the corresponding knowledge base article).
The reasonable thing to do in such a case if of course to require users to "[verify] [they] are the account owner" by receiving an SMS verification code on an arbitrary phone number (they explicitly mention the possibility of "asking a trusted friend or family member" for this).
Realms are obviously different because the two versions are incompatible.
