The issue is that X was never a mature, feature-complete, stable project.

Looool. It was too stable, which means stagnation.

bloated hodgepodge of disparate and barely working patches.

You mean bloated protocol or bloated implementation? Because kwin_wayland is pretty bloated.

The entire point of Wayland is to do exactly what you say tech should do: solve the particular problem (graphics server) well and cleanly, and limit itself to a definable set of features so it can actually reach that point of stability.

Tying graphics server to audio server is very clean.

Can someone debunk this please? It feels like something is overlooked here

Wayland offloads a ton of stuff that was core to X11 (like input device handling) directly to the compositor.

Not exactly. Imagine if xorg was also desktop environment with own compositor and effects. That's what wayland compositor is.

This is an excellent counterexample to claim 1, and I wish this was the top response to my comment. It not only negates the claim that "maintenance mode" isn't bad, it also provides specific examples of when it is bad.

Then the problem is that it's abandoned, not that it has stagnated (which can also be phrased as "stabilized" depending entirely on context and the speaker's/author's personal feelings about the project). Once again, I'm not saying that Xorg is good, but that particular critique needs to stop; it's major flaw is that even the "maintainers" are sick of it and want it to die, not that it has ceased major developments.

Even the article acknowledges this:

Having something as central as the window server being unmaintained is a major issue, as it means no bug fixes, no security patches...

But it also falls into the "Bells and whistles" side of the critique immediately after:

... and no new features

and it even starts of explaining the problems with X by saying it's in "maintenance mode." I couldn't care less about new features, the Pareto principle implies 80% of users don't need new features regardless of how much dopamine they get from seeing the marketing hype. "Maintenance mode" isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. Abandoned projects that most GUIs still rely on is a disaster waiting to happen.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

That's an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples. Do I take it on faith that changing code can break things with X? Yes, but I, having worked with code, just assume that's what happens to all software. Do I believe that Wayland has found a way to do away with that problem of software architecture (and not necessarily protocol architecture)? Not unless they've somehow found a way to compartmentalize every single module such that every aspect is fully isolated and yet has interfaces for every potential use case that could ever be dreamed up. Any devs in the comments want to pipe up and let me know how that endeavor has worked for them in past projects?

Just tried it on my laptop and xwayland apps are still blurry mess, even after restart. However, all apps I use now has Wayland support that can be enabled with some flags or environmental variables, so they are actually usable now with fractional scaling. Finally I can use my laptop with 175% scaling, which is much more comfortable than 200% scaling.

I also want to try COSMIC when it comes out apparently it's got Wayland support built in and looks pretty good imo