Back when Wayland was just being proposed there were not a lot of developers working on X. They almost-unanimously agreed that it was time to break with backward compatibility and eject a lot of cruft that had built up over the years, such as the horrible font handling. Modern toolkits had already started moving away from using many of these X11 facilities and were doing much more client side anyway. So the argument was that a relatively clean slate design was called for which should dispense with the cruft and better handle client-side rendering.

It's not perfect and I know it is disruptive for some people, but at least here it has led to a much better experience for some years now.