I find in retrospect that the legacy console versions of the game were always so much more cozy than Java or Bedrock. The worlds really felt more like your own home in the classic versions; not just a near-infinite display of eternally explorable land that always feels foreign. To an extent, you needed to be more careful with your resources too, as sometimes they were extremely rare and you could cause an item or block to go "extinct" in the world, because you carelessly threw it out. You can see that as a hassle, but I found it a more realistic and fun experience having to think a bit more about how you managed the world.
Unlike the infinite worlds, you can't just fly off to some far-off part of the world you never visit and demolish an entire beach or desert for infinite sand, because, with the limited world size, you would be tearing up your own home and making the world look ugly (unless you're the YouTuber ibxtoycat who loves doing things like that ๐).
I miss the small worlds, and even though the engine limitations of that old version would have made it a stretch, I would have loved to see the recent updates (1.15-1.21) come to the game.
There was a charm to multiplayer survival worlds in Legacy, too. Because of the small size, you would bump into your friends just doing their own things, minding their own business in the worlds so much more often than in infinite worlds, where they could be hundreds of thousands, to millions of blocks apart from each other and only interact through the in-game chat or voice-chat. The world as a result felt so much more alive with multiple players. I miss the old console version...
You know you can artificially limit the game world size, right? Either with console commands or Iโm sure theres a mod that does it too.
The problem is that the world generation also needs to be tweaked to make up for the loss in world size on Bedrock and Java for it to actually work well. For example, in Java edition, you can shrink the world size by setting how far out the world border is, but you are going to miss out on a heap ton of game content and biomes, because that game content isn't designed to be spread apart in such a small space.
You see, the legacy console versions were really good at nicely spreading across all the in-game content such as biomes, items and structures across the limited world. As a result, the biomes were always so much smaller then on PC, because the world itself needed to be more tightly condensed. The game would always try to get at least one of each structure at a minimum, and most if not all of the biomes in there. The other versions simply don't have this, and most modders aren't going to have the motivation to implement different generation for their limited world size mod for every new version of the game that released.
On a side note, I prefer the world border method of having an ocean surrounding the world with an invisible wall, since it makes the world feel like it's actually small. In Java, you can see the world continue to generate outside the border, which, when shrunk to make the world smaller, gives you the sense that you're simply trapped in a small section of a world and can never fully explore it. In legacy, you know you can explore every nook and cranny.