There is such a thing as taking the "Unix philosophy" to a non-functional extreme.
If you took the Wayland approach to shipping a Linux distro, you would ship only a kernel and a libc and maybe Bourne shell and a few GNU utilities and it would be up to the user to decide which other libraries and utilities they want to compile to actually get the system booted and get work done. And if you really want to, you as a user can do that and it's a very educational adventure. But most people expect a system they can actually use after installation, and most distros understand that giving them that is a good thing.
If Wayland shipped as a full replacement stack for X11, with a fully-featured desktop-oriented reference compositor and basic utilities that could be swapped out for distro or user choices of different components and configurations, then the Wayland folks would be entirely correct to say "we shipped a fully-capable replacement for the old system, any choices users or distros make that replace the default components with less-functional or incompatible ones are not our problem". But that's not what they did; they did create Weston, "a minimal and fast compositor", but it's described as "suitable for many *embedded and mobile* use cases" (my emphasis but their words). And it ships with "a few demo clients". Wayland + Weston + that handful of clients is not an X11 replacement.
We saw this play out also with GNOME 3 and extensions. Iâ(TM)ve been actually using GNOME Shell as my default desktop for the last almost-decade and with *every release* some extension I installed and built my workflow around has stopped working. (And in some cases those extensions were installed to undo unwanted changes in GNOME Shell's own behavior, like showing the overview by default on startup.) The change didnâ(TM)t *reduce* the amount of work involved in maintaining a functional desktop â" it just *shifted* it out of the GNOME dev team to all GNOME users (and an ecosystem of extension developers that became necessary to give those users back a semblance of what they had before).