I was going to point out that wayland is a protocol & surely there must be other ways to do this. But your point about mesa expecting wayland-client is a very tight binding here.

Anyone know of exceptions? People who get mesa working anyhow, some way?

It also doesn't preclude people from making nicer experiences on top of libwayland. Again I'd be curious to see what material is out there. It feels like a library that materializes the current state of things into a local view would go a long way to dispel the rage of people such as the author here, who seem to detest callbacks with firey rage.

The idea of the wayland registry seem unifying & grand to me. Ok yes it's async & doesn't hide it? Lot of ink spilled to be upset about that, and doesn't feel like an immutable fact that must govern life, if that for some reason makes you as mad as this dude.