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Can someone ELI5 why one would want sway vs just using i3?

Sway uses Wayland, which is shiny and new and fast.

i3 uses X11, which is old and crusty and not particularly fast.

But apparently a big difference between X11 and Wayland is that people implementing X11 window managers don't have to go out of their way to support particular graphics hardware. I have never in almost two decades of using X11 on Linux found myself worrying about whether my window manager supported my graphics card.

That's because X11 is a standard, running on a stack of other standards (DRM, KMS, etc.).

Wayland is also a standard, that should be running on a stack of other standards (DRM, GBM, etc.), but then Nvidia comes along and goes "Fuck GBM. I'll make my own, incompatible "standard"".

No, that is because X servers only provide the mechanism (window system, graphics, events, input, etc) but not the policy while providing functionality for the clients to provide that policy themselves. So a window manager can be made with and rely only to functionality provided by X11.

On Wayland the "window manager" (compositor) has to provide both the mechanism and the policy.

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