After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental “fragmented” ones, and I don’t see much problem with this model in practice either.
Part of what drives me nuts about Wayland is they could have learned these lessons from X's history and actually had it in mind. Instead, they threw it all out without learning a thing.
They absolutely chose to do the protocol with enhanceable protocols, something greatly missing from Wayland, so I don’t think your criticism is fair here.
The fact that developing a new compositor with wayland basically required wlroots to be even feasable for a one-man project is concerning enough. The amount of stuff you have to handle is insane compared to writing your own x-wm.
And developing a new compositor also does not require wlroots. Originally there was libweston, wlroots is just another option.
We could call it X-Wayland
Sway made it initially but others are using it too. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots
You may be interested to learn about wl-roots though. It's a project that I think originated from sway, and it aims to provide most of the low-level plumbing for writing your own Wayland window manager/desktop environment.
If you want to do something even slightly off the happy path, GNOME is the worst Wayland experience. Because of ideology (and in the name of security), they refuse to implement features and extensions that users and app devs need.
Example: No support for server side decorations. Instead, their solution is to force app devs to use client side decorations.(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1836)
This is just an issue that I have run into; there are more. Even ignoring wlroots and KWin, users coming from Windows and macOS except features like this.
Practically, for small apps that don't really have their own style (or games that are just one big opengl window) it's much better to rely on the window manager to provide a titlebar that somewhat fit in with the rest of the system. This is what users expect when coming from Windows or macOS.
Instead, apps like kitty just provide a godawful stopgap titlebar for GNOME users, because implementing good CSD is outside the scope of the project.
Fortunately, Linux has desktop alternatives that are better than Gnome. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find an alternative that isn't better than Gnome.
By whom… exactly?
/s just in case…
The observed practices outlined in the Helloween Documents were a "crazy conspiracy theory" first as well. Until it turned out to be a very real conspiracy.
You do realize this is one of the most lauded OS X features ever?
It makes it so that whatever program your are using, you never have to dig in 4 places to figure out where the Settings or Print menu is.
Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.