Horses were added in 1.6, that was in 2014 not long before it sold to M*crosoft, so I’d say MC was already a pretty huge deal at that point in time.
While I agree that mods and MC updates are fundamentally different, we shouldn’t ignore the difference in circumstance either, Mojang has a large dev team that does it full time, I bet my code would be less janky if only I had someone who’s being paid to test everything back and forth for 8 hours a day.
Although personally I don’t even have an issue with the quantity of the updates. it’s more so that in the last years there’s only very few things that impress me or I feel like the game actually needed, a lot of post-M*crosoft additions feel like random content mods being thrown into the base game.