Look closely. A Creeper is currently able to start blowing up when 3 meters away from you, and forces anybody who doesn’t want it to blow up to get 7 meters away in just 1.499 seconds. Creepers have always been known for their big boom, but have you noticed just how sensitive and trigger-happy they are lately?
This is a change to how Creepers react, not the original parameters of how close a Creeper had to be to blow up on you. It is a modification, intended to be a "nerf" that Mojang made to Creepers, not in Beta, not in 1.5, but many years after Minecraft 1.0. Three blocks to trigger and seven blocks to run away is not a nerf. It asks an absurd amount of agility from the player, punishing a failure with great annoyance as your lawn and/or house sustains property damage, even though you were not even close to it or going to take any damage. It's badly designed garbage. It is absolutely certain that this was not always the case, and that Creepers did not require any such change. Combine that with the fact that Creepers are common and have always been able to show up almost anywhere.
The wiki's changelogs, suspiciously, say absolutely nothing about this change or when it happened. It appears to be set on pretending that Creepers were always impossible to fight, and that there's no such thing as a legacy-Creeper who blew up when it was actually necessary.
Fix it. This is your icon. Don’t make Minecraft’s icon this much more annoying than it ever had to be.
