edit: actually mc renders locally so unless it was running at a really low resolution, I suppose it must have been painful
Also a quote from 2016: "The original team has stopped supporting it and starting with 0.9 MCPE became a lot more ambitious technically, which also means that it became a lot harder to strip down to run on a Raspberry Pi. Actually, we finished removing all Pi related code to reduce complexity in 2015."
If your interest is simply in running MC on a Pi you're probably best off looking into Java Edition, though I have no idea how capable the hardware actually is graphics-wise. If you're more interested in MC on cheap hardware, you're probably better off with a cheap Windows machine and the Microsoft Store/Bedrock edition written in C++ for performance.
also, I never understood the meme but can it run Minecraft? since the game engine and mods can be pushed as far as you want on latest high-end hardware, and does struggle/gives bad playability on low-end hardware
that said they have made an outstanding effort to at least make the game run on potatoes, even if it looks less glamorous