For literal decades they proved how malleable the protocol is, yes. Then they decided to ignore how malleable the protocol is instead of even trying to e.g. start by deprecating obsolete functionality and disabling it in future versions.
When XRender was introduced, for example, was the perfect time to deprecate server-side font-rendering. It's trivial to shim on the client side if anyone cared about the legacy functionality, and it takes a trivial amount of code to switch to using XRender instead for it instead (been there, done that, written a font renderer).
There's been plenty of opportunities to gut the legacy parts of the protocol that way, and reduce the complexity.
Grouping the main set of extensions and declaring that if the server reports a certain version number or above they
When XRender was introduced, for example, was the perfect time to deprecate server-side font-rendering. It's trivial to shim on the client side if anyone cared about the legacy functionality, and it takes a trivial amount of code to switch to using XRender instead for it instead (been there, done that, written a font renderer).
There's been plenty of opportunities to gut the legacy parts of the protocol that way, and reduce the complexity.
Grouping the main set of extensions and declaring that if the server reports a certain version number or above they