This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.
> This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious.
So what exactly is a "shell" ?
My attempt at a definition of a desktop shell would be:
The collection of all the software that aids a compositor (or a window manager on X11) in providing a more complete desktop experience.
Now that's kind of vague and probably also not quite correct, so a more concrete explanation would be: A program or collection of programs that gives you desktop notifications, a taskbar (with a system tray), volume controls and more stuff like that, maybe even a neat menu to configure most of this. Usually for standalone compositors/window managers you'd usually use a collection of tools like dunst, polybar, and the like, but with newer tools like quickshell, which was used here, it's reasonably easy to build a single tool which handles most of that. And that's what we're looking at here ^^
Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.