How it got from there to “let’s use it for everything on the Linux desktop and ditch X” I’ll never understand.

Just because they wanted it so badly… They had 2 fundamental problems with X:

1 - Everybody except the super nerdy nerds confused the ‘X client’ and the ‘X server’ all the time, and thought the naming were wrong.

2 - The networking was hard to set up / troubleshoot.