Did we read the same article? First of all the Xorg maintainers are still mainting Xorg. Second the issue with Xorg was never how legacy the codebase was, but that the Xorg spec is garbage (which anyone who has worked with Xorg can verify). The Xorg implementation is robust and awesome, and no one is disputing that. As for why Wayland is still behind Xorg in many ways a lot of the fault isn’t in the protocol itself. Xorg is much more heavily ingrained in the linux ecosystem, and most projects have been optimized to work with Xorg. The tools, and libraries for writing software with Wayland and Weston are not nearly as plentiful. I run my own tiny X window manager written using libwm. There is currently no libwm equivlant for Wayland. Most peoples experiance of Wayland is probably through a ported wm like gnome. The problem is that gnome was archatected with Xorg in mind, and all of the weird quirks and edge cases were worked out while it was being built on top of Xorg. Also remember how much shittier many WM were a decade ago? I still use X and probably will for quite a while, but Wayland is something we need.

Wayland is basically a protocol, it is the implementations where the heavy lifting is done. Some implementations seem to be working really great (Sway and the library it uses for wayland support called wlroots and possibly other mature window managers based on it), gnome wayland seems better then gnome xorg when it comes to stuff like screen tearing and other stuff seem worst. KDE is still a work in progress.

The argument of “wayland is X years old and does not work yet” is also problematic because it is used a lot in embedded (where it is mainstream and probably it’s benefits are more prominent) and attempting to port it to desktop (at least seriously) is a relatively recent endeavor.