I appreciate your perspective as a newer player. I’m glad to see folks like you getting into it.
I don’t think I implied that Minecraft was better before Microsoft. Having that big money and wide audience has kept the game relevant and it’s great that they’re continuing to develop it. I was primarily pointing out that they used to do more with less, and they didn’t tease us with unattainable content.
Here is a console command that may be useful to you for large scale terraforming.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Commands/fill