Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

Why wouldn't you? XWayland is still X11.

> Will I still be able to use my window manager of choice

There's no technical reason why one couldn't run nothing but XWayland on top of of a bare-bones Wayland compositor and proceed to use whatever X window manager you'd want.

> Will I still be able to forward X applications over SSH or native TCP between my laptop and PC on the same desk

Again, XWayland is still X11. You can forward X over SSH, allow random X clients to connect to your machine, set $DISPLAY To whatever you want, and so forth. (I might add that you can trivially forward *Wayland* over SSH too; I typically do this a few times a day. And anectdotally, Wayland forwarded over chained SSH connections works a _lot_ better over the internet than using X...)

> and that those using lighter and way more efficient stuff will be out of the game very quickly.

Those who care about those "Lighter and way more efficient" environments need to step up and actually maintain/adapt them. F/OSS has always been a "do-ocracy" -- Folks work on (and/or support) what they want or otherwise care about.

Yes, getting paid to do something is a mighty powerful motivator. Should that not be allowed?

> and it's no longer the users.

The user counts beg to differ. In absolute terms (and probably relative too), Linux (and/or any sort of UNIX) on the desktop has never been more popular.

> GNOME is only dropping support because they're seeing that a few bleeding edge distros are shipping this unfinished stuff

X11 is also "unfinished stuff", and by your logic should have never been shipped.

> GNOME would only drop legacy support once the new one is feature complete.

What *exact* feature(s) are you referring to here?