I think they're working on something as well. But just in case, MATE are experimenting with Wayland using Wayfire as the compositor, which is funny given that Compiz was very popular with GNOME 2/MATE back in the day and Wayfire is very much inspired by that.
I read something about this but is MATE as viable an option for most users as XFCE in 2024? I can’t tell if there’s much of a community around it.
I'd think so, otherwise it would've been dropped by a lot of the major distros by now. They don't have a specific community like the XFCE forums, though they do have a dedicated wiki.
Awesome. KDE and GNOME had the resources to make a big push and fill in the missing gaps for themselves, but having smaller, more modular desktops also tackling a port, that's really important for defining/extracting useful libraries and identifying potential shortcomings in the standards.