I'm using gnome rn and it doesn't crash much anymore. When I used xorg, there'd be crashes that brought down the entire desktop (or the computer as a whole) too. Also, generally every time I have a crash now it's from using xwayland to play a game and having certain extensions enabled at the same time (although those issues seem to have disappeared recently too). All the other issues I either don't care about or are supported with some extra work. For gnome, some of the issues are just because they have a phobia of exposing settings and you need to use stuff like dconf to deal with it.
Jesus what joke of an implementation, it's the anti theist of Linux. Everyone got fooled and allowed GUI developers implement the rendering backend...
As you mentioned earlier, it's a protocol. Implementation issues are due to how gnome/kde/whatever implemented their compositors. I think it's pretty much standard for Linux given that stuff like systemd and flatpak exist. If you want to use something more traditional unix-y, maybe you should use a bsd or solaris derivative or something.