This is a common misconception, thank you for bringing it up.

Wayland and modern post-KMS Xorg do not control your hardware, and have no real ability to do anything with 3D acceleration outside of what Mesa/DRI/DRM/KMS grant them the permission to do. Wayland and Xorg both call the same APIs provided by them, and call them effectively the same way.

The side effect of this is fbcon can be ran on modern "all shader/no fixed function" hardware without special hacks and I can run a 3D accelerated program on the console with no X or Wayland running... which also, by extension, makes X and Wayland both just simple normal programs that don't particularly do anything special.

If you can't run Steam games, this either means Proton (or the native Linux binary of that game, for the few that have them) has a bug that has nothing to do with Wayland, or your system isn't setup correctly (this happens most often if you accidentally install an Nvidia GPU and use binary drivers).

You can run steam games on Wayland. Spent over 30 hours playing Hollow Knight on SwayWM, even with fractional scaling.

Why not? I use Steam under Wayland all the time. (Although it uses XWayland, but it is seamless for me). In fact I prefer it because a lot of games try to do stupid things under X like change the resolution or always put themselves on my "first" monitor (and often mess up mouse inputs if they are moved). Under Wayland they behave much better.

The only thing that I can imagine that you are talking about is lack of proprietary driver support but that doesn't really seem related to Steam.

This should be fixed soon: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

Same here. I would daily drive it except my laptop has Nvidia/I use Steam.

My other machines mostly use KDE or Sway on Wayland though.