Yeah, Wayland needs to act like X when using a pure X application.

But emacs X/"gtk" frontend has been controversial for a few reasons, with work having been under way for quite a while for a new frontend, somewhat unrelated to Wayland.

Xwayland not working on pinephone is ironically primarily an X problem, as Xwayland is just xorg-server compiled with only the Wayland backend enabled.

And, as there are little to no xorg developers, fixing xorg is proving tricky as there is no one to make a new xorg release...