This reminds me of warzone 2100. After its publisher (punpkin) ceased trading, some dedicated ex-employees and community members managed to liberate the source code in 2004.
Now it's available in some of the major distros and is still updated to this day.
I can think of a couple more things, like forcing everyone to switch to a Microsoft account and the chat report system. Or the performance problems that were never truly addressed after 1.13. Even the combat update (1.9) I still don't like.
But it's certainly not ruined. As you mentioned, they still regularly update the game with cool features and new blocks, and many of the problems I mentioned can at least be fixed with mods. I would just like to see it fixed properly in the vanilla game.
+1 for Prism Launcher btw