Comment by gmueckl
This question sounds to me like you suspect some outright evil getting projected here. That would go too far. The wayland project tried to get the support of X developers early so that they could become a sort of "blessed" X successor early on. Plenty of earlier replacement attempts have failed because they couldn't get bigger community support, so this had to be part of a successful strategy. Any detrimental effects on X from that move were never a direct goal, as far as I am aware, just a consequence.
This isn't quite right? Wayland was literally created by an X11 developer who got two more main X11 developers in. It's a second system, not a competitor as such.