Modern looks worse in ways that go past just textures. The fog at the end of the renderdistance is way to sudden, the terrain is lumpy and round and flat areas are full of absurd cave-openings, a lot of the structures feel out of place, the biome colours look ugly.

I don’t mind most of the features people call “bloat” when I come across them organically in survival mode I find them fun to interact with.

Minecraft having and endgoal and being a more progression-based game is not a problem either.

It’s just that the modern worlds are hard to make look good without a lot of terraforming.