ive been playing this game since 2011 when i was in middle school and im still coming back to it. im sinking hours into it after work while my puppy sleeps next to my desk and my gf is working evening shift. its such a cozy game and reminds me of when i spent all day after school playing MC and other games w friends. its not just nostalgia tho, its just such a cute game that can be whatever the player wants. after all this time, i still derive so much joy from exploring a new world, building a sprawling estate, spelunking, and even just mining. even tho MC doesnt track ur hours played, im certain its my most played game
just wanted to share that i love this game 
It's a lot more than just a regular sandbox for me. I started playing it very early on, but I was in high school and had played plenty of other games my entire life. The thing that makes MC special (on PC at least) is that it can become so much more than the base game. It creates a foundation, but there are so many mods to change things up. I also loved making Redstone things. The largest being a large 8-segment display of a clock with something like 32 bits for the time and 1-second precision. It's where I learned how to do electrical engineering and logic gates, even though I was already interested in programming.
With the modding community, it also promoted adding things you think the game needed, and people supported each other. For example I made an anvil mod to repair items, which got fairly popular and is now pretty much exactly how the anvil works in vanilla, except with custom assets which was a lot harder to add back then. The game was whatever you wanted it to be, not just what the developers created.