What constitutes "modded Minecraft"?

Question

I realize this probably sounds pedantic, but please bear with me.

A recent question prompted this matter once again¹: a user wants to start modding their Minecraft but runs into a problem, but the question is closed as "technical support for modded Minecraft".

I had a micro-discussion with user dly about this in the comments (using the spoiler format for visual distinction):

As I see it, the biggest problem with modded Minecraft is that there are so many variables (and bugs and bad programming) coming into play that giving the right solution to a problem is virtually impossible.

My dry, technical point is that I think we should make the distinction between 'modded Minecraft' and 'about-to-be-modded Minecraft'. The state of the latter Minecraft, no matter how you look at it, is non-modded.
Alternatively, we could phrase the close reason as "technical support for modding and modded Minecraft" or something similar.

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Meta questions that deal with the problems with 'support for modded Minecraft' and 'technical support' are:

• Minecraft crash questions should be made off-topic: yes/no?.

• What exactly is technical support?.

If needed, I can make a list of applicable passages from these questions.

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^{1: "Once again" because this happens every now and then. It seems the words 'mod' and 'modded' in combination with a Minecraft question are enough grounds to use our highly specific, exclusive close reason.}

Answer 1

Thanks for bringing this here! Lets see what the others have to say.

My opinion is: About-to-be-modded Minecraft is fine as long as the question is about Minecraft itself and not about the mods that are about to be installed. If you scratch the mods from the question and its still valid it's a good question.

In our small conversation the question was about installing mods and their prerequisites. This is Minecraft mod support = off-topic. In this particular case the asker wants to know the Java version required for the mods. Since we can't tell what Java version each mod needs or what other mods are required to run properly this is pure tech support for the mods and not for Minecraft. Even without modded tech support this question should be closed for being unclear (What mod throws this error?).