Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.
And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.
One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].
Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.
Minecraft looks very similar to original Wolfenstien or Ultima Online. Probably a bunch of earlier games that used blocks of simple textures. It's not an original art style, and it's not gonna stand up in any fair court. Notch never claimed that he invented the graphical style of Minecraft. He deliberately used low complexity graphics for ease-of-use and the ability to create large, performant maps.
Also Luanti probably could doge all this if they just ditched all the blatant minecraft clone mods. A mining game with blocks is totally fine. If you look back at infiniminer, it's clearly a different vibe of the same concept.
You're confusing copyright with patents, and you cannot patent a game design. Well, you couldn't. I'm not sure about these days. In any case, this isn't a patent claim. It's a copyright claim, and copyright protects expression, not the idea.
That'll all become glaringly obvious when this is reinstated, because the copyright claim is bogus.
The design or gameplay isn't the issue, the aesthetic is clearly Minecraft.
You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.
I'll be honest, you sound like someone's grandma who calls every game console a "Nintendo" and every game character "Mario". So what if the general public can't tell the difference between Samus and Mario? That doesn't mean we ban Metroid.
They're the same genre, but obviously not the same game. Is only one voxel sandbox game allowed to exist in the world? What's next, only one platformer can exist? Only one action movie is allowed to exist? Only one power metal band in the world?
What are you talking about? There are no Minecraft assets in that screenshot, even with "pixels mixed around". I play both games and can tell you that screenshot is easily distinguished from Minecraft.
"IP" is not a legal term - instead there are copyright, patents and trademarks. If you want to argue that copying an art style violates some law then be specific what laws you think it violates and why.
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
Even though those are mods, it's a bad look to be holding those up as reference game images.