[trinix912]

They did provide several notices regarding that years in advance to shutting down the old auth servers and also had a long migration period during which you could log in with both accounts (assuming you have migrated the old account to Xbox/Microsoft).

The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.

[hot_gril]

Their notices required you to re-verify your original email address, which so far has never been required. So lots of people (myself included) had their passwords and could play fine, never mind the 10-year-old @aol.com account tied to it, and could do nothing but watch that deadline approach before being locked out.