[jauntywundrkind]

That's a typical view, but I see it as a lot less monolithic because it's using the kernel to do a huge amount of the things X used to do itself.

There's a lot of other concerns (input handling, screen shots, etc cetera) but at the heart Wayland is mostly just a management later for *nix dmabuf's. Mode setting concerns are done by the kernel too. Libwayland mostly uses egl, is my understanding. It invents so much less than X, where-as when X was made, the OS had none of these abstractions to reply on. X was basically the kernel, part 2. Wayland has none of this baggage; in almost all implementations leverages a world of great ready made stuff rather than implementing itself. Source: https://wayland-book.com/surfaces/dmabuf.html