It’s crazy to me that there are no Linux DEs dedicated to creating a faithful reproduction of the Platinum era Mac desktop. One can configure XFCE or MATE to get something vaguely similar, but it’s really not the same.

Would like to try my hand at building something like that myself, but X on top of being phased out is a strange beast to learn and there’s practically no material on writing something for Wayland.

There's one setup that I've used with XFCE before, but it's not perfect.

I've been working on and off implementing some Platinum stuff in Pharo's upcoming new graphics layer (called Bloc) and these have come out OK. That's where I'd really like to use it -- my whole desktop can be like Hypercard

> Would like to try my hand at building something like that myself, but X on top of being phased out is a strange beast to learn and there’s practically no material on writing something for Wayland.

You should look up the work of Sir_Cmpwn (aka Drew DeVault), specifically the wlroots project and his excellent writeup: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/29/Wayland-shells.html

No doubt. Pixel Art at its peak. The icons in particular were spectacular. But none of it would be considered pretty by today’s typical aesthetics. Shameful really.