But the gist was basically that Walaynd devs built a good core and then decided they wouldn't do any of the integration work between graphics and window managers, etc. The article implied devs had bad experience with the monolithic X and wanted to break most features out to other folks.

Sounds reasonable but resulted in every window manager/desktop having to implement their own integration, with different designs. Which resulted in an inconsistent mess.

Things like screen sharing over Zoom, (which is taken for granted on the Big2 OSs) was impossible for a decade+ until someone else built bridges over gaping ravines of missing/prohibited functionality.

Found this thread that sort of supports the idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349270

I don't think it helped that the core protocols were so minimal though or that the reference implementation was really just that. Both GNOME and KDE went their own way on building their own compositors and I think that was sad :(

Also, the people who originally developed X were brilliant and X was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

In general:

- Brilliant people in the eighties will still write better code than typical people in the 2020s.

- Ditto for brilliant code. A lot of this is actually pretty random. Sometimes an idiot will architect something great by accident, and vice-versa.

- Most things written in the eighties still used are really, really good in some way (or they would have been replaced many times over).

So most attempts to replace classic technologies end up with dramatically inferior replacements. Classic Unix was really, really good. It survived not because OSes in the sixties and seventies were any good (most weren't), but because if you build many of them, one will turn out great.

I'm not sure there's much more than that.