still present in 1.17, but not to the same extent
the game also tends to cause huge system-wide stutters on certain hardware when starting up
isn't that caused by lighting?
I'm fairly sure this is 100% intentional as it's been like this for 10 years now
You'd have to use a mod to enable support for this ingame, as Java Edition never natively supported controllers, and likely never will.
entities have no smooth lighting, only blocks.
Another issue is the fact that Alpha doesn't get patched correctly due to incorrect flags in the JSON files which leads to your name always being Playern (where n is a random number, or a hardcoded number depending on the version) (see MCL-18826)