My personal anecdotal experience is that wayland is a lot better than X11 performance wise. It feels snappier, and it has been rockstable. Please note I'm using a KDE based distro(neon) and on both nvidia and intel gpu it has been great.
If you are looking for raw performance based on simple frameworks, I do believe X11 will probably better, but for most people wayland will bring improvements. Yes I could get insane terms performance in an urxvt with FB under X11. Do I need it? Not really when my the system still behaves.
As a devil's advocate argument, it is true that wayland has come from being a lot worse O(years) ago.
some complaints from OP: * "A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications" - this was true, but it has started to change, see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart#... * "You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design" - I do not see this as an issue, other than having emotional attachement to Xorg. * "It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations)." - this is true, but again, it means that instead of complaining to a monolithic project you complain to a specific implementation. And I disagree this would be wasteful as there are clear design decisions done differently by different wayland implementation. * "Wayland breaks screen recording applications" - Google Meet, Zoom, OBS Studio all work fine here. I guess if you mean X11 recording, then yeah it's broken. * "Wayland breaks automation software" - yeah, again, changed of display protocol will break existing automation. That's called change, and is not inherent to wayland * "Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD" - that one's valid. * "Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality" - Well duh, it's not X11, it does require a lot of new implementation. X11 was made as a kitchensync that can do everything. That's not necessarily a good thing in the modern world.
I think there is a pattern there, the OP is mostly complaining that things are changing and some new things don't yet work. But he forgets that wayland appeared out of very good reason: - inefficient indirect rendering - security flaws(too easy to actually do a keylogger) - kitchensync approach(where it did everything) making it large and monolithic.