Sure, the Mojang team itself tried to make it more accessible, which is a very reasonable thing to do for any game really. I know there are many games, where a wiki is mandatory, buta game should explain itself, so I understand why they did that.
However (although I haven’t really followed it) the community still seems to be pretty much the same as before to me. If anything the stuff they archieved is even bigger, than back then. Stuff like Distant Horizons or the Create Mod could simply nit have existed back then.
What I’m getting at is that you don’t have to play vanilla and there are more possibilities than ever before (including lots and lots of modpacks and servers, which definitely do need an external wiki)
“Back when I started playing there was no community”
I’m sorry but that’s just… false. Maybe you weren’t aware of it, but even in the Beta there were already mods. I myself started playing in 1.0 and played until around 1.7 and basically all the playtime I have was playing on servers or modding the shit out of this game. (Back then you actually needed to do that manually, as mod launchers weren’t a thing)
So I’m still a bit confused as to why you are frustrated, since noone is forcing you to play the new vanilla versions.