Running arbitrary GUI applications as root is such a huge red flag that I'd suggest just looking at another distribution instead of resorting to workarounds.

This is the actual problem. I have used yocto for close to a decade. This conclusion is wrong, the fix is right there. The rest of the article is superfluous.

Their solution works, and I’ve resorted to things like that before, but it is not “the most correctestest way” because, in my experience if you need to use sed in a recipe you’re way off the reservation and there is usually a “better” way.

Then I had to port this stuff to a different hardware platform that only supported Wayland. The programs could no longer place themselves where they wanted to, and a simple helper/manager script I had based on xdotool of course also no longer worked. As an extra bonus, on the X variant I'd use x11vnc for maintenance purposes to find out exactly what was being shown, which also broke down on Wayland. Took weeks to get things ported, leaving a few rough edges that were worse than on X, and not a single thing that was better for the system developer's or the end users from Wayland.

I'm sure some of that has improved since. One of my first attempts there was to use ivi-shell, but occasionally I needed to show a browser on the screen and at that time Chromium had too many random crashes under Weston.