Do you mean the Aether mod that recently got updated or something else?
Installing mods to Java Minecraft can be a chore regardless of the ecosystem. And usually it's a third party mod loader that adds a new version to the default launcher config, not something provided by Mojang.
That said, Aether is a Forge mod and I haven't used Forge in a few years at this point, so maybe things are different now, or I'm only remembering the way that the rival Fabric ecosystem works instead.