[immibis]

Huh? You don't need libs to use X11. You can just open a socket and send messages. And thanks to the protocol actually defining most of the message IDs you don't even need as much nonsense. 60% of that "bloat" in X11 is stuff Wayland actually needs, and lacks, making it a failure until it gets them. 75% of the rest isn't harming anyone, besides the trees the extra documentation is printed on.

Have you implemented a Wayland compositor by yourself? Without libs?

Desktop systems having desktop system calls is not "sabotage" any more than Linux having open and close syscalls is "sabotage". At some point you have to draw lines in the sand, and say which stuff is in scope and which stuff is out of scope. A useful API does things, which means there have to things in scope. You can't leave everything as an optional extension unless you are defining some kind of absolutely generic message transport layer with absolutely no semantics (not even message ordering or reliability). Is Wayland a protocol for making GUIs appear on the screen, or a protocol for launching nuclear missiles? Right, so it should have features that are relevant to making GUIs appear on the screen. These are core features. "Make a GUI appear on the screen" is a core feature of Wayland even if you pretend it isn't. By requiring the use of five extensions to do that, you do not make anything simpler or more modular, because they are interdependent. You do not increase compatibility, because now you have effective compatibility profiles based on extension sets that are equivalent to protocol version numbers except you didn't call them that. You just make the compatibility story more complicated for no benefit. Abdication of responsibility for a thing doesn't make that thing unnecessary.