A variant of the second-system effect: one decides to reimplement something from scratch to incorporate all the lessons learned, avoiding the pile of hacks that accumulated over the years.
Then, as the project grows, you find people have been relying on hacks for so long you need to reimplement them. But your new, clean version is not designed to accomodate such abominations, so you need, very inelegantly, to hack them in.
Now you're back at square 1. Until the next naive engineer that decides to do the things the right way, once again.
But it is not situation in Wayland - it is simple - so you need to implement hacks at a different layer (it is often impossible to implement them on the Wayland layer). No matter how much stuff you throw at the compositor layer the core is unaffected.
Then, as the project grows, you find people have been relying on hacks for so long you need to reimplement them. But your new, clean version is not designed to accomodate such abominations, so you need, very inelegantly, to hack them in.
Now you're back at square 1. Until the next naive engineer that decides to do the things the right way, once again.