Regardless of how you feel about Wayland, its creation set off _massive_ improvements across the entire Linux graphics stack.
For those of us who were using Linux on the desktop in decades past, remember when you couldn't use a GPU without X running? Remember the days when you needed an X session running in order to use CUDA or OpenCL? Remember the days when the entire graphics driver lived inside of X? When display server issues caused kernel panics? Remember the days when you couldn't share a hardware graphics surface between processes? When it was impossible to get hardware acceleration to work offscreen?
Wayland's aggressive stance on "it doesn't work on platforms that don't fix all of that" is one of the only things that pushed the stability and flexibility of the graphics stack on Linux forward.
I don't really think anything less than saying "We the X developers are going to stop X development and X is going away" would have been enough to push graphics card vendors to actually rework the drivers.