1) the old, mostly working thing is being abandoned in favor of
2) that new thing which doesn't work in so many cases it's laughable, even after 11 years. How many years was it between the concept of X and a working release at Palo Alto?
Note that the new situation is so perfect for passing the buck from the windowing system to the compositors, and compositor folks are busy fighting feuds over which one another's private protocols or even public ones they are not going to support.
Oh, and the browsers. Chromium is making its first shy bumbling steps towards actually working on Wayland! A mere decade after!
I've heard it was so much easier to write Wayland clients, what could have happened?
Upd: This toxic development culture in a nutshell is exactly what this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 is about. Well, we know it's not limited to Google.