I don't play 1.12, but that's because I don't play with mods. I only really liked the simple ones, and I prefer the recent updates more than mods at the moment. Honestly, Quark and Storage Drawers are the only mods I miss. Also, people are now finding ways to recreate entire mods as datapacks. In fact, you can get at least half of Quark by downloading multiple datapacks.

Also, I think mods will rise again at some point in the near future. Think about it. First, 1.7 was the most heavily modded version. If you wanted mods, then 1.7 was the version you downloaded. It probably had more mods than 1.8 - 1.11 combined. Then 1.12 came out, and tons of new mods came out for it. That's 4 versions practically ignored by mod development. Now, here we are at 1.16, 4 versions after 1.12. Yes, datapacks are becoming more popular. However, there are still things datapacks just can't do. Plus, there are still many players that prefer playing with mods. Maybe 1.17 won't be the next, modded version, but mods can't stay behind forever. They need to catch up at some point.

mostly because qua servers its the most recent stable version, and there is a plugin for almost everything, but whenever you gonna take look at 1.13+ you noticed that the tps(tick per second) goes way too high, and the lag will start coming. and when i have talk about modded, there is just a 80% chance that the mod you need is there, while if yo go higher you notice that there are just not enough mods, thats just because when we were at 1.12 a lot of people still played minecraft and made mods but they went away when minecraft wasn't popular anymore, and still nowadays people working on 1.12 mods more then 1.16.

It's definitely the most recent version of Minecraft that has the strongest modding community. With every new version of MInecraft it seems Mojang changes something that messes with mods so a decent amount of mods haven't got updated yet. There's still some who play 1.7 because of some mods that never updated past it. With how often Minecraft has been updating recently (4 pretty big updates compared to the smaller 1.10, 11, and 12 updates in just 2 years only a couple months apart), modpacks haven't had much time to develop. There's also been some performance issues since 1.13

1.12.2 is great for mods so I almost always use that for modded worlds.