Case in point: the core Wayland protocol desktop applications use for creating and handling windows doesn't support basic functionality like minimizing them, be

Case in point: the core Wayland protocol desktop applications use for creating and handling windows doesn't support basic functionality like minimizing them, because Gnome doesn't think people should be able to minimize windows. So there's a complete duplicate of the Wayland window creation protocol as an extension to add support for features like this. Actually, effectively several complete duplicates since they keep changing the protocol in ways that aren't backwards compatible whenever they need to add new features.