Item sorters are great for storage, but don't help with the mess of items that end up in your inventory if you're exploring, or building. And while shulker boxes help a little, a) they're an end-game item and b) they are a pain to use if you're switching items often (place down shulker box, swap your inventory items with those in the box, mine the box, every time you need an item that's not in your inventory).

In theory, sure I guess. But my biggest issue is being unable to go exploring more than 100 steps without having to dump stuff into a chest.

I’m working on fixing this with mods.

Shulkers help tremendously with that as well, imo you don’t need mods. I just carry a couple empty shulkers - but I guess every play style varies

I’ve have and use shulkers (and a shulker farm).

This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them.

Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects.

I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”.

The only viable fix is mods.

Bundles are a nice addition that helps with this as well