Not impossible, it just needs to be implemented at a different layer. The compositor needs to expose some API for global hotkeys. For example, I found this with ~2 minutes of Googling: https://wayland.app/protocols/hyprland-global-shortcuts-v1
And that's a problem, now instead of knowing that something just works in the WM you're using, you have to cross-reference a matrix of features for basic tasks across different WMs because the bare minimum features are not found in the core protocols. Nothing is standardized, it's just a pile of different WMs developing their own sets of custom protocols.
> Not impossible, it just needs to be implemented at a different layer.
Do you mean the Window Manager layer?
That sounds like a different way of saying "impossible".
In X11 I can create an automation tool that works regardless of the underlying WM, or even if there isn't an underlying WM.
Can't do that with Wayland.
> Not impossible, it just needs to be implemented at a different layer. The compositor needs to expose some API for global hotkeys.
That's a big problem. When things become an optional extension for a compositor, that means you cannot reliably deploy something that depends on it to Wayland.
At this moment, things in the wild are coupling themselves to libwayland-client and in practice ossifying its ABI as a standard no matter what the wayland orgs say about it.