Maybe the problem is precisely that Wayland is not an X replacement, because that has led to a situation where there is a certain mismatch between the different pieces of the stack. Few people really understand what Wayland actually is, and how it works, and how it all fits together, which means only few people are actively working on the ecosystem.
Love it or hate it, but systemd has been around since 2010, and is almost ubiquitous by now. Wayland has been around since 2008, and it still seems more like a tech demo for most use cases rather than something that is production ready. There is clearly an issue with this project.
> Maybe the problem is precisely that Wayland is not an X replacement
For the understanding of all of this by the community, certainly. But Wayland could have never been a direct replacement for X. The problem with X is not that it's old or poor quality. Even if that were so, that is fixable. The problem with X is that its fundamental design principles are not suited to a desktop made after the early 1990s.
The reason X is much more entrenched than being a display protocol very much has to do with every X running system having a standardized X server any system process can talk to. That client server principle was fundamentally flawed and Wayland fixes that,
but that very same client server principle allowed this X ecosystem to thrive. Any "X replacement" that did away with X11's core design problems would therefore run into not being able to replace the ecosystem in the same way.
If there would have been a coordinated effort to replace X, we would have needed a much broader initiative pop in 2010. An initiative where Wayland is one component, something like PipeWire another, and some Freedesktop IPC standards for e.g. accessing the clipboard and other features provided out of the box by X11, and reference utilities implementing those standards.
But coordinated efforts like that are not really how the free software community works! So Wayland just evolved out on its own. It started as a small effort by developers frustrated with X11 the display server protocol. The community then proceeded to take the line "Wayland is a replacement for X.org" and then ran with it, creating confusion everywhere, and stifling progress to replace X11 in the process.
Systemd is quite unique in the free software world because it's a tremendously coordinated effort and has taken on a broad scope. And just look at the sheer amount of vitriol that ended up getting just for those aspects of the project. It's just not how the community likes to operate, or at least a vocal minority does not like this.
That is all true, but the question then becomes whether Wayland will ever be widely adopted. For most users X is good enough, and replacing it with a quasi beta-quality implementation is not appealing to them. As long as there is only a very small group interested in developing the Wayland ecosystem, it is unlikely ever to get to the point where users (or distros) can be convinced to adopt it.
The way things are currently going, Wayland may turn out to be another HURD: it's always a year away from being ready, and there are some enthusiasts working on it, but in the end, it is supplanted by a more pragmatic solution. And the only way that is happening is once X is falling apart enough that some company like Redhat coordinates an effort to replace it.
Yes, this process of moving away from X11 has been terribly mismanaged - by not being managed at all really. But it's not quite as dire as you're saying.
> For most users X is good enough
It's good to understand the converse is also true. For a lot of users, Gnome with Wayland is also good enough [1]. Fedora's default install has been Gnome with Wayland since Fedora 25, which was released almost four years ago. Since then I've primarily used this non-X11 desktop on my Linux desktop, although I did fall back to X11 for specific scenarios. Debian 10 and CentOS 8 (both released over a year ago) also default to Gnome with Wayland for a desktop install. Red Hat's and the Debian Project's decisions there may have been questionable, but this is still software many, many users use daily despite its limitations. It's certainly well beyond a GNU Hurd situation even if it doesn't reach your or my desktop standards all the time.
Despite the utter mess this transition has been for years, I do think Wayland will persevere in the end and become dominant. Features users expect from a modern desktop, like fractional UI scaling, rich trackpad gestures and browser hardware video decoding are implemented more quickly for the non-X11 desktop stack. People seem to implicitly agree it's the future, although to this day some essential parts of it are still left behind. That's just the free software community for you - no centralized planning or vison, and nobody works on the boring parts.
[1]: It's only been Gnome so far that has reached this level of "mainstream acceptance". KDE with Wayland is almost there, and Sway has a lot of enthusiasm around it too.
Wayland has been enabled by default on Fedora for nearly 4 years, on Debian for 1.5 years, and on RHEL/CentOS for about the same (the GNOME editions in each case).
Sway has been working great for quite some time as well.
KDE has been lagging behind, but is finally at a place where it will be usable by the next release.
It's therefore somewhat difficult to identify with your phrasing. Wayland is already here, "ready" or not, it's taking over.
> Wayland has been around since 2008, and it still seems more like a tech demo
Look from another side. Wayland has been around since 2008 yet it accomplished something X.Org could not. It's been 30 years in development, it has tremendous market share and yet it failed. There is clearly an issue with this project.
Love it or hate it, but systemd has been around since 2010, and is almost ubiquitous by now. Wayland has been around since 2008, and it still seems more like a tech demo for most use cases rather than something that is production ready. There is clearly an issue with this project.