In addition to what Neonred wrote: Steam Deck uses Wayland by default and its Steam is configured to run just fine on Wayland, even if it's possibly using XWayland behind the scenes.
Years ago Nvidia employed a developer who fixed incompatibilities with their proprietary driver. He looked at what caused the issue and even had the driver fixed when Plasma exposed a driver bug.
Then Nvidia decided not to continue this and most KDE development now happens on hardware supported by FOSS drivers. Valve investing in KDE because of Steam Deck and its FOSS Radeon drivers underlined this trend.
You actually think the X11 protocol remembers any window positions?
Neither Wayland nor X11 do. It has always been the window manager that does it and whether or not some specific window manager does this using either protocol is an implementation detail of the WM.
How much RAM does it use and how does this compare to running a web browser with a few open tabs?
Seriously, unless some memory leak makes a DE consume 10 gigs of RAM, nobody will notice because DE's RAM use is dwarfed by what end user applications use. 10 years ago I got a notebook for 600 Euro with a 16 GB RAM upgrade for an additional 100 Euro.
Performance differences are either rendering speed or perceived performance because of animation speed. With the exception of embedded hardware, RAM use for desktops is irrelevant since quite some time (and on such constrained hardware you can't properly browse the web anyway).
Probably some desktop that only now started to adopt Wayland in an experimental state because the maintainers thought that playing "wait and see" for way too many years was a great idea.
they might catch a breath thanks to how good this yearโs lineup is
The lineup Microsoft's higher ups and/or shareholders make them release on PlayStation and Switch 2 as well because the takeover of ABK sunk too much money and Xbox alone cannot recuperate it. The games that don't get released on Sony and Nintendo consoles usually work better on PC, even though they add artificial and ridiculous raytracing demands in Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages (the PS5 are less demanding versions, so that alternative exists).
There is less reason than ever to get an Xbox console.
Arenโt there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback?
Yes and no.
IIRC an MP3 track is divided in fixed-length frames and unless the actual audio matches perfectly with the end of a frame, it's not possible and that's why cross-fading plugins for audio players were invented. The padding data is there either way but can be documented in the metadata section of a file.
Last I checked (and that was years ago, so I may be wrong) this approach was never perfect and prone to breaking. It's an inherent flaw with the format where some form of workaround exists.
Augmented Steam and https://github.com/cptpiepmatz/great-on-deck-search
Both work fine on Firefox for Android when sideloading the extensions.
There are also a bunch of user scripts which do similar things but I haven't tested those.