It's mostly coz nobody really wants to improve X11. I don't think there is many wayland features that would be impossible to implement in X11 it's just nobody wants to dig into crusty codebase to do it.
And sadly wayland decided to just not learn any lessons from X11 and it shows.
What do you mean nobody wants to improve X11? There were developers with dozens of open merge requests with numerous improvements to X11 that were being actively ignored/held back by IBM/Red Hat because they wanted Wayland, their corporate project, to succeed instead.