The parent comment to this is absolutely correct (only took 15 years and we got a balanced take, nice).

It's also true that we did try to streamline a bunch of things to recover maintainability and basic functionality. It's not true that GNOME 'allies' tried to stymie better or more complete accessibility support. If you look at the (old, terrible, but still the only functional one we have) accessibility stack that Linux relies on, well, all of that came from GNOME - mostly back when Sun cared about the desktop.

Most everyone wanted a good and complete a11y story, but no-one stepped up to fill the gap. A lot of us didn't have the expertise required to design something useful, nor the time to spend a couple of years learning. The desktop-focused corporate contributors we'd expected to fill the gap, for whatever reason, didn't. So here we are with a broken stack, a couple of super-promising but abandoned efforts to properly fix it from the ground up in a way that also works for browsers, people who rely on a11y technology (or even just 'complex' input methods full stop) being frustrated that nothing works, and the people who built the thing originally sad that nothing ever came to pass.

It's not that multimedia keys were deemed more important than proper CJK support, or assistive input or whatever: it's that the people who were there at the time were perfectly capable of doing one but not the other. Rightly or wrongly, we felt that we'd be doing people a disservice to try, because what we'd create would be so terrible that it was better to leave a void for someone to step into.

Equally, the 'HiDPI was forbidden because of GNOME' is a weird take. It wasn't there originally because we had a million other things to get working. Eventually, the first cut of HiDPI support which served us for a good 10 years or so, was contributed by a GNOME developer.

(source: input in Wayland is mostly my fault, but I've not worked on input for a very long time)