It doesn’t really. Server side mods don’t touch sky rendering code at all, and most client side mods also don’t come anywhere near it. I last did Minecraft mod development some 7 years ago but even then you would basically never reach into the raw drawing calls unless you were implementing shaders or something.

Considering the vast majority of mods are just adding some items or creatures, they don’t need to worry. This won’t be more than the regular API changes in between versions that they’re already used to, unless it’s a more graphics heavy thing like a shader mod.

Also, even with shaders, it’s fairly straight forward to port a shader from OpenGL to Vulkan (for the most part Vulkan just gives more flexibility in that regard). The stuff around it is the hard part.

Not a Java implementation, but the original game was written in Java. Later, Microsoft bought Minecraft and rewrote it (Bedrock edition) which runs on Xbox, tablets, etc. But, the community writes mods in Java.

Now both exist and get roughly the same feature set now, but the Java version remains popular given the vast variety of mods and servers.

It’s the Java version of the game, not a game version of Java.

There’s a native version called bedrock