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.
> 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.