Paint me crazy but for last ~10 years I'm having this weird feeling that FOSS embraces corporate-style of management, development for projects too much. The ethos of having a choices is slowly and steadily being replaced by "comply, adapt or begone" tactic. And if you try to voice your opinion or heavens forbid - criticize, you are committing a crime against the coding humanity.

The changes are being done by small steps and I'd say this removal of fallback to X11 option counts as such.

It definitely feels like there's a dedicated core of people insisting on removing choice from the Linux ecosystem. RedHat, Gnome, fredesktop.org ... they have an ideology and a strategy to make it dominant in the Linux world and it does not feel nice to many people.