Reading that helps a bit, but you still won't understand the complicated graphics stack without prior knowledge. Is there a good introduction that systematically goes through all (or most) of the components for the average Python, C, database etc. programmer who knows absolutely nothing about computer graphics?
Yeah I guess it won't make sense without more context, I.E. understanding the rest of the graphics systems on a computer.
It seems like it's a standardized interface for a windowing library like wayland/x11 to talk to a graphics driver, specifically for setting up regions of the screen which will be rendered into by something (opengl etc.)? So there were non-standard ways before?
Well, before there was only X11 in the Unix/Linux world. And the mechanism was GLX. It had different implementations over nearly 30 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLX
