I'm going to run a Minecraft server with my kids over the summer.
I'm looking into the kinds of tweaks and customizations you can do with Data Packs.
And man, this is some wonky programming.
There are no "if" statements, but you can put a filter on a command so it only runs for entities with certain attributes.
There are no variables, but you can add a tag to an entity so you can catch it in a filter later.
There are no events, but you can get and set the number of times a player has taken an action, so if it's > 0, you know they did it.
There are no loops, but you can schedule a function that runs every game tick.
There is no documentation, but there are YouTube videos demonstrating how to do specific things.
It's a programmer's nightmare.
You can't actually create your own entities, but you can summon an invincible invisible armor stand that is unaffected by gravity and tagged with a custom model, then teleport it incrementally.
To correct the lighting issues, use an invisible armor stand that is on fire.
There are named functions, but the level of modularity is the file system. Each function is in its own file and the name of the file is the name of the function.