That tearing issue even comes from a tradeoff space: a couple days ago on another thread about X people were noting that to avoid the tearing Wayland seems to have higher latency, and some people (and I would be one of them, were I to experience this) care way more about lower latency than "never ever ever see tearing".
I can't find the story you're talking about here, but one thing that would be good to understand here is whether this is some flaw in the Wayland protocol, or whether this is an implementation issue in a specific Wayland compositor like Gnome's Mutter. People tend to blame a lot of issues resulting from immature implementations on some unspecified "Wayland" (whatever that means).
All I can find is that in the past Mutter had lower latency for its Wayland implementation when compared to it using X.org, but it seems that Mutter's latency story has always been iffy in the past. FWIW it seems that Sway for example has finely grained input latency tweaks built in while being Wayland compliant [1].
...which was a peculiar discussion because I don't think anyone mentioned that just about everyone runs X today with some combination of DRI2 or DRI3, which involves plenty of latency, boundary-crossing, and buffer-copying.
> First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more complex to work around its limitations.
