To add to this, there was a pretty large consensus among X developers probably 10-15 years ago that X was not a viable future direction and it needed to be aban

To add to this, there was a pretty large consensus among X developers probably 10-15 years ago that X was not a viable future direction and it needed to be abandoned. The alternative to Wayland (or Mir, or whatever) is not going back to X, the alternative is do nothing and bitrot sets in and you just don't have a functioning desktop anymore after a while. I wouldn't even say the network effect matters that much, a huge part of the work has been disentangling the drivers from X. It's not very visible work to userspace developers but it's probably even more important than any work on the window system. The DRM/KMS/GEM subsystem is now widely adopted for kernel drivers, that work took a long time but doing it correctly means userspace is now freed up to implement any windowing system they want without having to deal with the driver mess caused by X.