It's not a bad comparison to make when people are writing entire new compositors just to provide, say, a tiling experience - exactly the way they used to write window managers. I understand you're trying to be "fair" to Wayland here but the fact is there is a lack of an abstraction boundary where there used to be one. Maybe that abstraction boundary can be reinstated by a well-written compositor with a plugin architecture, but that isn't standard the way the window manager interface is (unless you can persuade everyone to use that one compositor).
I think you're missing that authors of tiling window managers don't actually want to go back to the X11 way of doing things. They don't want to write a basic window manager or a plugin. That abstraction boundary is bad and it's extremely limited. That's why the X Composite extension was created in the first place. There was a chance to go in the opposite direction with Wayland. People did actually make plugin APIs but they never became standard, few developers wanted to use them. Instead wlroots became popular because it allows a lot more power and flexibility over compositing. The compositing approach is what allows Hyprland to have those nice transparencies and animations. So it's not that I'm trying to be fair to Wayland, I'm actually trying to be fair to X11 compositors. You're skipping that whole step that happened in the mid-2000s when you make your comparison. People wanted to make compositors all along.
