Correct ^_^
Tank was likely captured in Egypt in the 50s or 60s, and transported to a military workshop next to the city - probably to study Soviet armour.
Years later the city was expanding, so they decided to move the base someplace else and someone decided to just burry the thing instead of transporting it again.
At least, that’s the official, “logical” explanation that we got that conveniently ignores the possibility of secret Soviet space-time travel experiments!

Construction workers were digging foundations at a local work site and found a Soviet T-34 tank burried in the ground.

Important context:

• My town is not in Russia or the former USSR.
• My town is not in Europe either.
• Our military doesn’t even operate Soviet equipment.
• My town is also not next to a border with a country who might have operated Soviet equipment when it was also not so friendly with my country.

There are some plausible theories, but to this day nobody really knows how it got here or why it got burried.

Ohh and the real kicker: the street this all happened on is named after an indigenous tank, so the news headlines all basically said “Tank found on Tank street!”

There’s a very nice (albeit somewhat outdated) talk here.

In a nutshell, both X11 and Wayland are protocols that define how software should communicate to (hopefully) display stuff on your screen.
Protocols as in there’s a bunch of documentation somewhere that says which function a program must call to create a window, without specifying how either program or function should be implemented.
This is great because it allows for independently written software to be magically compatible.

X11 is the older protocol, and was working fine good enough for many years, but has issues handling a bunch of modern in-deman technologies - issues which can’t be fixed without changing the protocol in a way that would make it incompatible with existing software (which is the entire point).
Plus its most used implementation - Xorg, consists of a huge and complex codebase that fewer and fewer people are willing to deal with.

Wayland is the newer protocol, that mostly does the exact same thing, but better, in a way that allows for newer tech, and completely breaks compatibility in order to do so.

The trouble with the whole situation was that in order to replace X with Wayland basically the entire Linux graphics stack had to be rewritten - and it was, with raging debates and flame wars and Nvidia being lame.
They also wrote a compatibility layer called Xwayland that lets you keep using older X-only apps which somehow manages to outperform Xorg.

Now we’re at the point where major distributions are not only switching to Wayland by default, but also dropping support for Xorg completely, and announcing that they’ll no longer maintain it, which is why posts about it keep popping up.

Does this mean I can stop setting MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND?
Or is it just enabling the compilation of Wayland sections (which I thought happened a while ago?)

Yeah no way, the 90s were something like 10 years ago and… wait now we’re in…
Ohh… Ohh no…

Right so just installed xscreensaver - automatic blanking and locking is indeed broken BUT it does display all the pretty animations just fine! (at least on Sway)
Don’t really have time to mess around with it but maybe try figuring out which mechanism is used for screen locking in your environment (in Sway’s case it’s swayidle) and get it to start xscreensaver right before calling the real locker program?
BTW you can get xscreensaver-settings to come up by unsetting the WAYLAND_DISPLAY variable:

env --unset=WAYLAND_DISPLAY xscreensaver-settings

Philosophical BS: I don’t think it’s correct to say that Wayland doesn’t support screen savers, but rather that it doesn’t support XScreenSaver, or, more accurately, the mechanisms it uses for screen locking and idle-detection.
As others have pointed out, equivalent functionality has already been implemented and is used by various screen lockers. What appears to be missing is something to take this functionality, and display an animation instead of just locking the screen.
I noticed that all of XScreenSaver’s animations are actually separate binaries in /usr/lib/screensaver/ so we basically need a locker that speaks Wayland’s locking protocol, but also takes and runs those binaries in full screen mode.
Or maybe XScreenSaver’s dev can be convinced to add support once the protocols are stable?

Powers of two, squares and cubes up to 20 and the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Maybe rebuilding the ramdisk failed during the original upgrade?
One of the post-install stages after upgrading the kernel is rebuilding the initramfs - a tiny environment for bootstrapping the main OS.
If you trigger it manually with mkinitcpio --allpresets you’ll notice it has fancy colorful output, with clearly visible warnings/errors.
However when invoked as part of an upgrade this coloring is removed, making errors difficult to spot.
I had this stage randomly fail a few times, resulting in an unbootable system like you described - solution was to just trigger a manual rebuild or reinstall the kernel with pacman -U.
It’s possible that this is what actually fixed things when you downgraded the kernel.

Thought this was about Valve’s Wine fork and was very confused 😅

Here’s a great documentary about it!
https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q

Kinda depends on how much you’re familiar with low level programming.
For a quick check to see if it’s for you start by learning a little about how a processor works here (the first episode can get a bit condescending at times, but it’s good info).
Then try diving into a disassembly CTF like MicroCorruption.
If you (somehow) enjoy both those things, consider learning C and specifically how to use it to break things through shellcode.
C Programming: A Modern Approach, and The Shellcoder’s Handbook are great resources for that (look here for instructions on obtaining them 😉).