I was about to say "no it doesn't" (having installed bookworm a few weeks ago, and most definitely not having wayland), but actually it seems you're right, and "by default" just means "if you choose one of the compatible desktop environments", one of which appears to be the default selection.

If that's all they plan on doing: awesome, actually, this way anyone can pick what they prefer. I was afraid they were going to pull something like systemd (though ultimately it makes sense, as maintaining sysvinit stuff for all services would have been unfeasible; not so, at least for now, with X11/Wayland).

Thanks !