From a gamedev perspective it wouldn't make sense to call what was happening "classic". It was unintended behavior.
What would make more sense would be to make a setting to allow or disable the intermission sections of the race (they'd need to think of another name for them though because they call the wait time between races intermissions in the settings already). Allow players to keep or remove the long stretches.
If it's not insisting, it's demanding, which is worse.
There are many tools now that replace X11 behavior. If Wayland doesn't "do what they need", at this point there's a strong chance they have not put in any effort into making it work for them.
For desktop forwarding there's waypipe.
For tablet users, KDE (And probably gnome) have pretty good tablet support at this point.
For artists, KDE JUST got much better color calibration and HDR support.
For gamers, WINE now has an experimental Wayland-native mode, and barring that we have Gamescope to make it behave semi-native (so this one is more of a future-ish solution that you can use now).
Screen recording mostly just works with pipewire and almost everything supports it now including Discord.
Those users can stick with the last version of KDE or GNOME that supports X11. They're insisting on using unmaintained software already, so it shouldn't be much of a leap to do the same with the DE.
It's really not fair to demand that people building your DE for free maintain two vastly different rendering stacks when they clearly don't want to.
Morbius