> instead of working piecemeal
That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1].
Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle.
Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver!
I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructur...
On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)
The irony.
I run one, which is why to me the irony feels reversed to what you probably meant. It's clumsy, slow and tedious to setup.
The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow).
Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.