Is Wayland really that bad though? I switched from Awesome to Hyprland, and the gaming support (VRR, HDR), among other things is much more straightforward. For normal desktop usage, I haven't seen much of a difference. Certainly not a negative one.

Wayland completely punted on the remote display capabilities of X11. There has been no effort to replicate this functionality. If you switch to Wayland, you can no longer run GUI apps through SSH.