I have tried using wlroots, it's very hard. If you had to build your own compositor Mutter is far easier (it provides a GUI toolkit and all you need graphic wise). QTWayland is very nice too but won't get you far outside embedded uses (no xdg portals, no screen capture, etc.)

WayFire makes wlroots a bit easier but I find it quite messy/not clear (but it's very powerful & flexible).

There's definitively the need for an easy high level API for wlroots (the main wlroots dev started working on a high level scene tree API some times ago but it now seems kinda abandoned)