I think large part because pipewire was basically just going in with the attitude of fixing the underlying system while also supporting all the existing interfa

I think large part because pipewire was basically just going in with the attitude of fixing the underlying system while also supporting all the existing interfaces, which made it very much a drop-in replacement which could support pretty much all the common usecases. Wheras wayland is a big 'lets change the interface' deal (probably a good call actually) which didn't really seem to understand that it couldn't just punt on all the existing usecases for the old interface (I think there was some belief it could just be offloaded to compositor-specific APIs, which is a terrible idea guaranteed to make app developers hate you and irritate users when every combination of app and compositor acts differently), so you get a lot of breakage while people beg them to actually add standard interfaces for things.