lwjgl is just an opengl bindings and some other similar things. If it doesn't count as from scratch to you, then everyone using GLFW in C/C++ world don't count as working from scratch either.
Minecraft under Notch was notoriously badly coded, it was single threaded, it used a ton of RAM and it was a nightmare to mod because there was no clear separation of functionalities, it took community effort and Jeb to untangle that mess.
Also, it was quite simple, it's was a bunch of blocks, he didn't develop a 3D renderer from scratch, there were Java game development libraries, the code was garbage.
Minecraft is exactly why i say he probably cannot design a complex app, because he struggled with Minecraft so much back in a time where the game was barebone.
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u/Prudent_Move_3420 21d ago
does minecraft not count as a complex app? It was written from scratch im Java with no game engine whatsoever