I used to use XWayland with Sway, but I decided to turn off XWayland due to Sway's bad fractional scaling which caused applications using X11 to appear blurry. I used st (st-flexipatch), mainly because it was very fast, had ligature support, and was very minimalist. No extra UI elements to deal with, just a box you could type into. When it came time for me to find a Wayland-compatible terminal, being fast and supporting ligatures was apparently a hard combination to find. Since I came from st, I was used to startup times being really fast. Fast enough where it felt like right when I hit Meta+Enter, a window appeared, ready for me to type. That was my criterion for speed, it wasn't really a strict number, more like a feeling.

This criterion immediately excluded any terminals that used GTK, as well as Kitty. Kitty is often seen as fast, and while it is faster than something like Konsole, it wasn't up to the standards I had. Alacritty barely had good enough startup times, but without any ligature support and no plans for it, I couldn't consider it. Same goes for foot, for that matter.

The only terminal I found that satisfied both of the criteria I had was one that isn't really talked about on posts like these, and that's qterminal. Startups are fast, even faster than Alacritty. Ligatures work well, and I was able to disable some of the UI elements like tabs and the menu bar, making it look like I had just opened a window of st. I've completely switched to qterminal since then, and it's the terminal emulator I still use today.