What's the best way to play the Java edition of Minecraft on Android in 2024?

"real" bedrock modding is still in its infancy, but there is progress. LeviLamina is a framework that allows for a lot of server features that were previously more or less impossible. https://github.com/LiteLDev/LeviLamina

Bedrock modding at the moment is focused more on serverside software because, unlike java, the core game code runs natively rather than in a java virtual machine. That means client modifications are a lot harder and require duplicated effort for each platform. That's without mentioning that the linux version of the bedrock server comes with debug symbols that aid decompilation.

Some client mods do exist though. We have onix, a dll injector that adds a lot of useful features. Unfortunatly it is not open source and it doesn't support linux so I can't speak for the quality or legality. People have also prematurely figured out shaders for render dragon(minecraft's new universal rendering engine). Useless shaders adds redstone level indicators and better chunk borders. https://github.com/OEOTYAN/useless-shaders/releases

Some missing plugins people often want for bedrock are carpetmod and litimatica. Trapdoor tries to act similar to carpetmod and Sructura can also can more or less replace litimatica for simple usecases.
https://github.com/bedrock-dev/trapdoor-ll https://github.com/RavinMaddHatter/Structura/releases

For world modification and analysis, the most complete solution is rbedrock. It is very useful for world trimming, village cleanup, and creating fake structures, and other things https://github.com/reedacartwright/rbedrock

Finally, redstone and mob farms. For redstone, the biggest problems people have are missunderstanding the differences from java. The main one being that redstone processing happens in two distinct parts(producer tick and consumer tick). Pticks happen every game tick but cticks only happen on odd game ticks(like javas redstone ticks). During a ptick, redstone consumers are just added to an unsorted list to get powered on the next ctick. That leads to the random result that is often complained about.

Mob farms are limited primarily by our miniscule 24 mob cap(8 surface 16 cave). Recent advancements have allowed the use of split density(abusing the fact that bedrock mob caps only check 4 chunks in each direction) to help reduce the issue. The other two weird quirks are that structure spawning is screwy(I can go to more detail if desired) and mobs spawn on the northwest corder of the spawnable block.

Technical bedrock does exist, it is just a less developed field than java. Lmk if you have any questions, I can try to answer them or link to some discords that I've lurked in to learn this stuff

My bedrock versions are modded, and the performance is butter. Considering it can run smoothly on pretty much all platforms, from toaster to high end PCs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "technical", however. Can you clarify? Redstone function, maybe?

I notice a lot of people still use the same old sayings when it comes to dismissing the most widely spread version of the game. Grievances so old they've been a thing of the past for years.

I'm not sure why, considering both versions are great for different reasons.

fair enough, I suppose.