Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can't remember offhand.

So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It's up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft's stewardship of the game, given how hard they've tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.

I'm guessing they are planning everything. From the official minecraft article :

Now we’re actively working on Vibrant Visuals for Minecraft: Java Edition and our goal is to bring it to the game in a way that serves not only our players, but also our modders and resource pack creators.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-vibrant-visuals

I'm surprised they never followed up on it, it was kinda cool. I really liked the reflective blocks.

They only implemented those in bedrock edition, available in the MS store... I'd rather they add it into Java edition so us Linux gamers can use them, and not tie them exclusively with NVidia

I think it's such a good implementation but it does make it a bit harder to play when you're in dark places

Play a different game

I have a feeling the developers of the most purchased game in the world arent going to completely change the graphics that made it successful

we've had that for years