Thoughts
Minecraft works as an invitation to play the game however you want. To kill the pigs or farm the pigs or befriend the pigs. With the
Cuteness update Mojang continues to demonstrate their belief that there's a correct way to play the game. They felt that they needed to make the mobs cuter in order to discourage technical players exploiting or farming them and maximize the number of people having cutsey cozy wholesome experiences playing the game.
It's not obvious but my point is that these things are in tension. Beautiful natural terrain makes destroying that terrain to make your base less fun. Cute mobs makes killing those mobs for food less fun. Minecraft has to balance this. You have to have enough interesting world gen to give you inspiration but not enough to make you hesitate to build. You have to have cute enough mobs that you can make your friends, but have them be ugly enough that you don't hesitate to kill them. Someone said this about intellegence too. If villagers or piglins are smarter it's not as much fun to put them in a hole and exploit them.
There's this post from someone I follow on Tumblr (and I'm not going to quote the whole thing) about his time replaying old Minecraft versions. My one quote:
> every time I play modern minecraft I'm reminded of how much effort was put into making it comfy. it isn't and wasn't a comfy game. they had to make it that way
=> https://www.tumblr.com/nightmarechamillian/790786156326469632?source=share