Hahahahaha you are aware there is tons of Lore and History in Minecraft, right? It is just not out in the open, so you need to go deeper.
Well that and a short paragraph on the Game Ideas Page about color coding certain things.
But yeah this is gonna be a Sandbox where most of the World is shaped by the Interactions of the Players and NPCs.
Though it is gonna be much more closely resembling the procedural World Building of Dwarf Fortress, where every World is a different procedurally generated set of Island(s, or Continents), that you access a couple hundred years after it has been generated in order to create a History to explore if you wanted to.
And that Info I dropped about Tech Artifacts still applies, since there is ofcourse going to be a History before the generated History.
And the reason Players always know they are Players is, because people who can just look up what they need to know in the Wiki (or ingame Documentation), do have some uncanny knowledge about the World in advance in a lot of cases, so it is kinda hard to pretend they dont know what they are.
Especially in Multiplayer where they could communicate in ways outside of the Game, and to spectators they just look like they use Telepathy to talk with each other, or stand there “doing nothing” and then a “carefully planned” Battle Strategy happens out of nowhere.
Dungeons and Dragons couldn’t really solve the “everyone sits at the Table and hears everything” Problem, and Baldur’s Gate 3 went around the Issue by just implanting a Mindflayer Tadpole into the Heads of all Players and NPC-Team-Members, and called it Plot.
The Players themselves indeed do not have a Backstory at all, since the Player is YOU. You have the freedom to make up some BS and call that your Backstory, just like in most of these Games. 