Why do any of these standards make it harder for other distributions and desktop environments to keep up with them? wlroots exists, and in many people's minds is much better than GNOME with Wayland. This really strange thinking.

Also, it isn't them that are making them the standard. It's independent distributions choosing to use what they produce (and not all of them do, either). Presumably, the maintainers and packagers who make those choices would be aware of these technical considerations, and capable of rejecting Red Hat's tech I'm favor of whatever hoary stack you prefer if it made it harder for them to "keep up." That seems to be something that is perfectly possible to do while still producing a usable distro, and it seems like something limit distributions are quite good at — ignoring what corporate operating systems are doing and forging their own path. Maybe it's because the technologies you are labeling as Red Hat technologies actually offer substantial improvements and push forward the cutting edge of the Linux desktop in a meaningful way, bringing it closer to the capabilities of a modern operating system?