After using Wayland as my daily driver for a couple weeks, I've found another thing that is _massively_ improved compared to X environments:
Input methods.
Wayland[*] has a standard text-input protocol that causes input methods to just magically integrate, across toolkits and compositors.
Getting Pinyin working was just a matter of installing fcitx5 / fcitx5-chinese-addons, running fcitx5, and configuring it to add Pinyin (and in my case latam español while I was at it). No environment variables, no toolkit-specific configuration or handlers.
[*] it sounds like GNOME may not implement this, which is fine since I'm mildly allergic to GNOME