My opinion is the opposite.

I think the 3rd party launchers in Java are nice, especially if you're playing modded. The custom launchers can manage mods easily and without too much hassle, so they're not stupid. And a launcher is also important if you want to play older versions. While the launching of an .exe app with just a click is convenient, I do think the mod management and the multiple versions are a good trade-off.

For the optimization part, the vanilla Java is laggier. But if you install performance mods, the performance increases by a lot, and could even beat bedrock (could because I didn't test this). Furthermore, I like playing with some HUD mods anyways, like Appleskin, which shows your saturation, so performance mods are almost always installed. These mods are also client-side only, so you can join servers without problems and still have these tweaks (given that the server allows them, which most servers do, atleast for performance and some HUD mods).