Shipping everything in a monolithic archive, even where it makes very little sense, is very powerful leverage. Suddently it's harder to exclude tools than it is to include them.
Wayland's big problem right now is that libinput developers gatekeep improvements so if your device isn't on the golden list it will work badly and there is no escape. Which is why I'm not using wayland.
> but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith
On the other hand it would be very rare to use Plasma without the KDE file manger. You lose all sorts of integration. Similarly, once you use systemd init its going to be a lot easier to replace everything else with the systemd equivalent.
Wayland is very much a monolith compared to X. I guess people never really realized how much desktop environments could be mix'n'matched under X, bringing window managers, system trays, hotkeys bindings, and a whole bunch of other things not designed together but that could still work together. Under Wayland it's all smushed together and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement. It's very similar to how systemd is going.
Wayland is a protocol, that sentence is in and of itself faulty.
And there are multiple independent implementations of said protocol. Unlike in case of X, that has basically 1. With proprietary modules (that's how nvidia proprietary drivers work). With a goddamn printer inside. Don't mistake an X "window manager" which is basically just an extension on top of an X server with a whole display manager implementation of Wayland.
Like an X window manager is more akin to a Gnome shell plugin that adds a dash to your screen.
Yes, that's exactly my point - on the user's side, X was modular, not monolithic. Wayland is the monolithic one where everything is "batteries included" (except not always everything) with no ability to add/replace functionality.
Please continue reading the remainder of the sentence from my first comment:
> and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement.
The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good.
Especially that systemd is pretty modular - at least the actual systemd program running as PID 1. It also refers to a project with many optional modules running under the same name, but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith.