I have noticed on my mining adventures that lava looks like water but acts spicy, i would hope in the future that this gets fixed.

also this is with sues shaders

Having the same issue. Only with SEUS. With other Shaders lava looks fine.

I am playing mc 1.18.2 with recommended Optifine, Forge 40.2.14 and SEUS Renewed Shader.

For your Interest. This visual error appears with the alex mobs version 1.15.6. In the previous version 1.15.5 the lava looks correct.
Happen with vanilla and John Smith Resourcepack.
When changed the settings "Lava Bottle Enabled" to off and / or Lava Vision Opacity, the visual bug still exists.

With the latest version of alex mobs + recommended optifine and recommended forge the issue doesn't appear. Lava looks fine. But I can't change to this version, because some mods of my custom modpack won't exist for this mc version, so I have to stick with MC 1.18.2 for a while.

The changelog on cursforge for 1.15.6 states:
-Fixed crash with Lava Vision and newer versions of forge
-Fixed crash with Froststalker AI
-Updated Chinese translations

Screenshots:
1.18.6

1.18.5

Also People talked about this issue too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Optifine/comments/l5a3dm/lava_looks_like_water_on_seus_tested_on_both/

Since Sonic Ether has some mentally issues and is apperently not paying any attention in optimizing his current shaders, whats the reason, why I write this issue here.

Edit:
Simplest solution is to change back to 1.18.5 ^^