The last time I used wlroots, via sway, I encountered a bug where I experienced 'multicolored snow' when watching a video in firefox. I wanted to record a video of it to report a bug, but of course that wasn't possible because screen sharing / recording still isn't well supported. Back to gnome I went, and I still don't think wayland is ready for primetime on smaller window managers

sway and wlroots have some of the worst error handling I've ever seen in C code. The number of null pointer bugs and assertion bugs is just mind-boggling. I don't really understand how hard it is to just gracefully handle errors. Literally no one would prefer to crash their entire desktop environment rather than have it silently skip over errors and output them to a log.

I recently used i3 again because my office computer has an NVIDIA GPU and sway doesn't support NVIDIA (yes I'm aware of the new GBM API, it's not ready yet and I don't care anymore anyway). It made me realize how much more gracefully i3 handles a lot of things, and also a few things it really doesn't (but that's more the fault of X11, not i3).

It's disappointing that the defacto library for Wayland is wlroots given those bugs.

A Wayland compositor is responsible for quite a bit more than an X11 window manager. Compositing, as you mentioned, but also display modesetting, input handling, clipboard management, and so on. Although, of course, one can use a library like wlroots or libweston to handle most of that stuff if you just want to focus on the desktop experience.