I tried to give a generic overview on the side bar, and it is intentionally vague about the cutoff point because what each person sees as the "perfect" era of minecraft is subjective.

• Pre-classic (May 10 – May 16, 2009)
• Classic (May 16 – November 10, 2009)
• Indev (December 23, 2009 – February 23, 2010)
• Infdev (February 27 – June 30, 2010)
• Alpha (June 30 – December 3, 2010)
• Beta (December 20, 2010 – November 11, 2011)

Anything above this is absolutely relevant to this community. Below is where it gets complicated.

• Official Release, or Java Edition (November 18, 2011 – present)

The official releases is where it gets much more blurry, and I think as long as it is a couple years old, and you have a sense of nostalgia for it, it should count. Perhaps even more complicated is modern version that have been made to behave like alpha/beta/etc versions through mods. I think those should be included as well.

I would still count any posts you make about your 1.14 worlds as relevant to this community. But perhaps a poll would be worth doing.

So I would say for a numbered era system, era 1 would be release 1.0 to 1.2.5 (the one before they added internal servers). Era 2 would be 1.3 (when they added Emeralds and villager trading) to 1.7.10 (1.7.2 was the one that added sunflowers). Era 3 would be 1.8 (when they added alternate stone blocks such as Dorite and Granite) to 1.12.2 (1.12 was when they added an advancement system that would actually save advancements properly and permanently). Era 4 would be 1.13 (when they added sea animals) to 1.16.5 (1.16 was the one that added Netherite tools). Era 5 would be 1.17 (when they changed how ores work) and so on (1.18 completely changed terrain generation so that it's way harder to find ores in the overworld). I guess 1.17 is really Era 4.9 because 1.18 was the one that made massive changes to Minecraft.

I started playing Minecraft seriously around Era 1's timeline and during the end of Era 1 I lost my modded Minecraft PC (which only had 1 GB of RAM) and is where I have fond memories of. I had only acquired a new 4 GB one to play modded Minecraft during the end of Era 2 I think. Near the end of Era 3, I acquired a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM, and in mid Era 4 I brought a new gaming desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM, an SSD to have my OS installed on, and a discrete graphics card. During Era 5 I upgraded it to have more storage devices with greater capacity for SSD and HDD, and later 32 GB of RAM. In December 2022 I acquired a Steam Deck system and it seems to be able to run modded Minecraft somewhat acceptably - seemly at a better frame rate than my gaming PC.

The "Golden Era" I would assume took place during Era 1. I remember building an Equivalent Exchange 2 EMC farm to generate diamonds in my old world. It cuts off from 1.3 because that update changed Minecraft in a way that caused my old laptop to not be able to run it at an acceptable performance level, also it got attacked by malware during that time and then I lost it too. 1.7.10 had a lot of the "modern mods" such as the Thermal series take over old stays from 1.2.5 and earlier such as Industrial Craft 2 and Buildcraft. 1.12.2 and 1.16.5 have most of the same mods from 1.7.10 but in a more up to date and changed state. 1.18 seemed to make Minecraft much more annoying than before due to the lengthier mining trips due to the increased height, the ores being shifted into the new negative height zones, and the "Deepstone" placed below the zero height taking more time to mine than regular stone.

I'm mainly interested in making complicated redstone contraptions and farms, and for that the best version is 1.12.2. That version has an incredibly interesting system of glitches that give it way more depth and way more stuff to do than any 1.13+ version.

For a technical minecraft playstyle the golden age ranges from 1.8 to 1.12.2. In 1.8 they introduced slime block flying machines, which are very important. After 1.12.2 they made a lot of changes that make the game less complex while also reducing server performance.