Had Notch thought too much about which language to use, maybe he would still be trying to launch a game today.
No it isn't, there are now two versions of Minecraft, the classical one, and Minecraft Bedrock, that is the one written in C++.
Minecraft Bedrock doesn't have half of the community that Minecraft classical enjoys, hence why Microsoft is trying to use JavaScript based extensions to bring the mod community into Minecraft Bedrock.
Finally without Minecraft classical market success, there wouldn't exist Minecraft Bedrock at all, so Java did serve well enough to Notch's fortunes.
And Java was a perfectly good choice of language for Notch for the same reasons.
I don't play Minecraft so I guess I'm outta touch. I knew about Bedrock and I've heard kids call Java the "old one". I didn't realise there's still an active community. Thanks for the correction :)