That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.
The point is, even if you could get a smooth experience it was at best an exception, specially across most of X11 life. There are many reasons why the Steam Deck shipped with Steam running through the gamescope micro compositor, and one of them was sidestepping some of the X11 jank.
besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.
and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.
this is not how it works. They have actual real data from real users about how many use wayland vs xorg, they also sit on the bugtracker, and they sit with the code. they also have very clear knowledge of how much time they can dedicate to make KDE better, both for themselves and EVERYONE.
They have decided that it is best for everyone to outphase X support. Several top contributors to KDE have also explained how several issues that people kept having under X, resulting in LOADS of bug reports, have more or less vanished now during wayland.
You might be having issues, others might too, but its arrogant to presume to think you know that most people are not better off than before, and of course those that at the end of the day matter most, the developers. This does not mean they want to hurt anyone.
I’m amazed at how smooth it is and how much just works.
Not my usual Linux development experience with xorg.