Yes, exactly. And Wayland ignored it for years, from the start, and only later slowly adopted it as an extension.

> DMA is part of the basic architecture of modern computers.

Yes, I know.

DMA is even older and not limited to Linux or Graphics. Back in the old VESA, SGI and Windows 3.0 times, DMA was a cool new feature (but actually old even then). When Wayland was conceived, it was boring and old. Yet Wayland didn't originally include DMA buffers, just later added it as an extension when it became obvious that they had just gotten rid of a 40 year old feature that was really really necessary for modern graphics...

When XRender was introduced, for example, was the perfect time to deprecate server-side font-rendering. It's trivial to shim on the client side if anyone cared about the legacy functionality, and it takes a trivial amount of code to switch to using XRender instead for it instead (been there, done that, written a font renderer).

There's been plenty of opportunities to gut the legacy parts of the protocol that way, and reduce the complexity.

Grouping the main set of extensions and declaring that if the server reports a certain version number or above they

Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre is ongoing even from publications that have many previous articles praising the same contributor at length. Corporate control of open source is very dangerous to the ecosystem as they also fund the "journalists" writing these articles who are willing to defend every decision they make.