What is Java Minecraft vs "regular" Minecraft? What is "modded technical Minecraft"?
"Technical Minecraft" involves building various machines in Minecraft; either in vanilla (unmodded) using red stone, water, and other properties of the game itself to do things - some are quite complex, but they can include things like intelligent mine cart routing, strip mining, and resource sorting.
"Technical modded Minecraft" involves one or more of the "tech mods" which MASSIVELY increase the complexity; one of the most famous is GregTech, which adds machines and electricity to power them.
Arguably the most complicated tech modpack is Gregtech: New Horizons which has you start out digging dirt with a stick and ends up with you on various planets searching for materials. It approaches and scratches the same itch as Factorio or modded Factorio (and arguably is somewhat like Satisfactory). End-game often involves optimizing the setup to reduce load on the host computer itself.
There are also modpacks with similar depth focused on magic; but the two become mixed.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/store/minecraft-java-bedrock...
And do I need to run the server, or is that only for multiplayer?
You can make the Java client "host a server" (open to network) which is fine for basic play and starting out multiplayer; but you can play single player with no server at all.
The server is nice (and free for Java if you have a machine to spare or even some CPU) because you can make a "persistent world" that's always there whenever someone logs in. But that can all wait for later.