Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X applications, and the world is moving away from X.

Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is.

Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.