Even if you do pirate Minecraft trying to use mods or do anything with it at this point is so beyond painful that it's not even worth it. Microsoft has made it a mess.

??? This is absolutely not true at all. The modding situation is better than it has ever been, in part thanks to mojang making the game's underlying systems more modular & extensible to facilitate modding, as well as deobfuscating the game's code.
The only thing you're giving up by pirating is playing on common servers, and it has always been like this.