OpenGL ES is nominally just a subset of a OpenGL version, plus a few specific extensions for mobile/embedded. OpenGL 3.2 and higher is for all intents and purposes "ES 2.0", just that ES 2.0 came out two-ish years sooner as a collected standard of the extensions.

For multithreaded minecraft rendering specifically, I was most involved around the ~2012-2014 era, where there were multiple attempts to replace or rework Optifine. A few of those projects were specifically about moving MC forward to use GL 4.2+ and multiple contexts for async chunk buffer prep. To my understanding they never completed for a combination of reasons:

1. Devs capable of the work made a lot more money modding for paid servers suddenly
2. Any optimization mod effort that didn't support client-mods (forge, etc) was ridiculed as useless (to be fair, most of the reasons for wanting better optimizations was exactly for modded MC reasons)
3. Any freelance devs wanting to do the work, often could afford higher end computers where it just... wasn't worth the effort
4. It was becoming clear that any sort of performance mod would need to deeply mod MC, and every MC version would require deep rework, and MC versions were coming out more and more often

So outside of some prototype mods I got to use, I am not familiar with any wide releases, but I know much of the efforts didn't quite go to waste and became the Sodium/Modrinth stuff today.

How can Minecraft use OpenGL 4.4? Genuine question. Minecraft runs on MacOS which is stuck on OpenGL 4.1 (due to metal shenanigans). Are they using a translation layer like ANGLE (ANGLE is only OpenGL ES but you get the point)?