But this is sort of the nature of the problem?

In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.

This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.

This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.

There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.

This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."

"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.

I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."

Could you briefly explain in simple terms, why I as a user would care about any of that? I want stuff to work. With Wayland, it largely doesn't. I don't terribly care about the semantics of it.