My suckless stack is Niri (Wayland WM), Foot (terminal), and Neovim. The suckless folks wouldn’t call it suckless, but it does suck less than anything else I’ve used on Wayland.

dwl is a great wayland port of dwm, maintains the original philosophy well

I assume they're doing fine, since that isn't really happening.

It seems wayland has sort of died off... you rarely hear it nowadays. It failed as replacement.

You don't hear about it much because it won. The developers mostly moved over to Wayland, it's the default in most places now, most (not all, sure) workflows Just Work, and often work well... dunno where you get the idea it failed as a replacement. It took a decade and a half, but it finally landed.

Wayland has been the default for Ubuntu for several years now, and Ubuntu is by far the most popular desktop Linux distro.