Using Wayland and i3 equals huge Geek Cred on the street. How bad is life in Wayland currently for desktop Linux?

Better than you think. Every other time or so I log in in Gnome Shell in Wayland mode.

Thanks to xwayland you can run the majority of X.org applications without much problems in Wayland. The major problem with Wayland nowadays is bugs (I remember crashing my desktop trying to run mpv with Wayland native output, however OpenGL+GLX backend seems to work) and missing features (mainly touchpad support that is still treated as a mouse, or no touch support at all).

However running a Wayland setup has its advantages too, mainly improved composite performance in Gnome. No more screen tearing or skip frames of animation.

Doesn't wayland require KMS drivers? I've never had any luck with nouveau doing anything but forcing me to reboot every few days.

I'm using nouveau without having to reboot that often, although I do sometimes have to ssh into the machine to convince it to unstick itself.

How possible is steam based gaming in that setup?

Thanks :) Things are mostly stable. Sway doesn't quite have all the features of i3, but it's getting there, and for bonus points it reads your i3 config file and interprets it correctly. I have trouble with floating windows, but if I wanted those I'd be using a different WM.

Probably my biggest complaint is that pretty much all of the graphical applications I use behave a bit oddly under Wayland because they're actually X applications running in XWayland. I spend most of my time in terminal emulators anyway, so it's not a huge deal.

Firefox and Chrome currently do not work on Wayland without Xwayland. But Libreoffice and Gnome work. You also have to use open source drivers for Wayland to work, so no Steam.