There's a meta-lesson useful here for anyone who doesn't know it yet: modern software has network effects. And the same phenomena you see with other networks apply to software stacks. If everyone else has implemented a protocol wrong, for example, and your software comes along that has implemented the protocol correctly, but as a result your software doesn't work with the existing stack,
a) Odds are, the rest of the world will not change to work with your software
b) New users, using your software, will perceive the problem is your software doesn't work, not that the rest of the stack is wrong and you're the only one that did it right.
Maddening, but it's the nature of complicated systems built by thousands of people in a distributed fashion.
(I can't lay hands on the link right now, but there was an ex-Microsoft engineer who had a blog where he talked about the heroics MS developers would go to every major Windows release making sure their OS was compatible with popular user software. It didn't matter that they were the company setting the rules in their ecosystem... If the latest version of Windows broke Photoshop, they had to figure out why. In that particular instance, it was because Photoshop had gained some performance optimizations by baking binary images of default structs the OS gave it into their code instead of calling the right API to get a struct properly initialized, saving a library call. MS had to reimplement some C++ structures in C so they could maintain the memory image of the relevant structs to avoid breaking Photoshop).
Wayland here ends up often being the scapegoat of a Linux community that looks to want to change but can't sort itself out. The result of blaming these issues on Wayland instead of - mostly - Gnome and KDE means that we're not going to the right places to have this fixed. In terms of bug reports, and contributions of code and money.
[1]: I mean, if you can come to terms with the substantial architectural differences implied by Wayland w.r.t. to X11. But that's a discussion on another level.
People, especially people trying to work done on their computers, usually mean the former.
It still smells, because I cannot load my own web components library or/and my own CSS for use on all sites, so every site MUST reinvent wheel.
When Firefox for Linux used native GTK+ UI elements in web pages, with user theme applied, every web page looked like native applications. It was excellent. Then this feature was cut, because "every page must have the same look on every device/OS combination". F><k. Now every web application tries to reimplement the look of Gnome 2.x, and does it poorly.
Unknowing users can freely associate Wayland with bad vibes due to how KDE and GNOME chose to brand their new compositors but we can do better.
But if Kwin & Mutter aren't quite shit when it was combined with X, but are shit when combined with Wayland, how does that shape perceptions of Wayland?
In an alternative universe there would be Kwin the X11 display server which would replace Xorg. I’m sure it would just be as big riddled and feature incomplete in the early years of its development.