> Window managers in general, xdotool, all kinds of input mapping and automation or the fact that you can write a screenshot tool in less than 500 LOC are only possible if you talk to X directly.

Honestly I think this is a pretty fair approximation of "no one". How many people are writing tools like this vs. the number of people writing regular applications? A very small number, I'd say.

And after working extensively with both libX11/libxcb and libwayland-client directly, I can say that none of them are particularly pleasant to work with. Actually, no, that's not true: libwayland-client wins, easily. Every single Wayland protocol has code generated for it that works exactly the same way. I suppose the same is (more or less) true of libxcb, but libX11 (and all the other libraries you might have to use, like libXrender, libXrandr, libXext...) are a complete mess.

And even then, libwayland-client has a much lower number of concepts you have to understand than libxcb does, simply because the Wayland protocol has a small number of concepts you need to understand. libxcb is definitely an improvement over libX11, but it can't magically make all the underlying X11 protocol concepts become unified.