cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/1249481
Meet the new forge, same as the old forge. Forge has been forked, with the majority of forge’s developers moving over to the fork, NeoForge. They hope to implement some major improvements come 1.21 and maintain compatibility with Forge mods on 1.20.
There have always been multiple mod loaders, and Fabric isn’t even a new one by now.
With anything past Minecraft 1.16, Forge has actually drastically reduced in popularity.