This is a common misconception, thank you for bringing it up. Wayland and modern post-KMS Xorg do not control your hardware, and have no real ability to do any

This is a common misconception, thank you for bringing it up. Wayland and modern post-KMS Xorg do not control your hardware, and have no real ability to do anything with 3D acceleration outside of what Mesa/DRI/DRM/KMS grant them the permission to do. Wayland and Xorg both call the same APIs provided by them, and call them effectively the same way. The side effect of this is fbcon can be ran on modern "all shader/no fixed function" hardware without special hacks and I can run a 3D accelerated program on the console with no X or Wayland running... which also, by extension, makes X and Wayland both just simple normal programs that don't particularly do anything special. If you can't run Steam games, this either means Proton (or the native Linux binary of that game, for the few that have them) has a bug that has nothing to do with Wayland, or your system isn't setup correctly (this happens most often if you accidentally install an Nvidia GPU and use binary drivers).