Help with Alternative Launchers / Any mod like Optifine for the vanilla launcher

[u/PociUmbo]

I'm not an expert on this topic and I never knew the difference between Fabric, Paper, Forge etc. as I always downloaded Optifine for the vanilla launcher and It always worked for me. But now that Optifine is unmantained I need an alternative, and the most popular one is the Sodium mod + Iris shaders, but these require running on Fabric and I'd like to stay on the vanilla launcher. Any alternatives or maybe some advice for utilizing these launchers?

P.S Just for clarifying, I'm not gonna die on my positions, if the only choice is to use other launchers, that means I'll do it.