I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is possible on Wayland.

It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you either

I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.

Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.

If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.

Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular hardware would have it fixed.

Okay, let's enumerate.

Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer.

Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics.

One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.

I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term.

Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.

I have been using linux for over 20 years and reliable hardware acceleration has always been more "miss" than "hit." This goes all the way back to having to disable hardware cursors on my very first linux setup. I hear the amdgpu driver is pretty solid, and the i915 driver I use on my laptop is great. Nvidia is just a mess (nouveau and the nvidia binary drivers are differently buggy) and the radeon driver is complete garbage.

My first linux machine was 386 with Trident 9000, running Slackware, so I'm pretty aware how linux hardware support developed over time. Maybe I was lucky in picking my hardware, but buggy basic functionality was a big exception (minor bugs were there, like in amdgpu cursor not picking the same LUT as the framebuffer, and being jarring white compared to redshifted desktop; incidentally, windows driver had the same issue at the same time).

Not implemented functionality - sure. I've never got TV out running on Radeon 7500 (RV200) during early 2000s, for example. But basic functionality (today), like freezing texture mapping on a hardware, that has 3d driver implemented and that driver comes with distro, no. But then again, maybe I was lucky in my picks.

Not obscure, just old. ATI Radeon HD 5000 series.

That doesn’t depend on the protocol, I think most implementations can simply choose a so-called “dumb” backend instead of hardware composition.