They haven't given up Wayland though, it's just not ready for primetime quite yet - especially not for an LTS. They stuck with Unity for almost eight years as well, that's pretty long haul. I'm unaware of them dumping NetworkManager?
I'd agree their support of ZFS seems to be in odd state, Neil McGovern had to deal with that weirdness as DPL [1] which was very annoying as the DKMS was a "good enough" solution.