They've had plenty of opportunity to do this and haven't, so would find it incredibly unlikely they would magically start to have a problem now

Not to mention doing would basically kill game as one of the biggest reason people even still play Minecraft is the modding scene, not the minimum viable effort that have been the official updates for last number of years.

don't think they could do it previously because the code is not open and any names are a result of deobfuscation so clashes are accidental

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, but let’s say Microsoft released an obfuscated version where the method FooBar is called FakeName instead. If I use FakeName in my mod, aren’t I hypothetically at risk of the same thing? How does the actual name matter for this argument?

Or is the argument that only source code is copyrighted, but not binaries so it only matters if the name matches the original source code? That doesn’t seem possible because it’s copyright infringement to share a retail game binary, so they’re clearly copyrighted as well.

So I’m really unclear how the risk here is any different regardless of obfuscation since the mod needs to use method names from the copyrighted binary either way.

I'm pretty sure if code is obfuscated there are no usable names and so people or deobfuscator comes up with original names.

Wouldn’t the structure of the code be be more copyrightable than the names?

community makes mods, they don't duplicate game code structure, and if they do it's clearly by accident because the code is obfuscated

But the mod relies on the code structure as much as it relies on the names, I think it could still be considered a derivative work, I don’t think this would be copyrightable but I find the code structure being copyrightable more plausible than the names