What changed is that the Wayland world keeps evolving, and things aren't always as dramatic as they first appear. Bridging the windowing semantics is difficult

What changed is that the Wayland world keeps evolving, and things aren't always as dramatic as they first appear. Bridging the windowing semantics is difficult indeed as the Wayland approach doesn't let clients introspect the windowing system or absolutely position themselves, but it doesn't mean you can't get quite far with the excellent relative positioning provided by the xdg-shell/xdg-popup protocols, for example. The video in the article demonstrates Notepad and other windowed apps.