That said, I understand what they were going for. They really wanted to make the compositor as small and simple as possible, so for example you would just use libwayland-cursor instead of bothering with cursors yourself. However there are a lot of ways libwayland-cursor worked out poorly... Not everyone agreed on how scaling should work, GTK4 ditched it for performance reasons, and overall it's just inconvenient for a lot of cases (languages other than C, sandboxing, etc.) And to make matters even worse, in practice every compositor needed to load and handle XCursor themes anyways...

That said, I think that it's okay if Wayland doesn't own the majority of the Linux desktop stack the way X11 did. It's fine for compositors and their helpers to implement protocols from other projects, too. That way Wayland can be more applicable to graphical machines other than desktops without bringing unnecessary baggage. It'll always have trade-offs, of course, but I think it's far from the end of the world.