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Blog post: A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XWindowsAllTheWayDown
tl;dr: the original idea of how you would program X apps is that most UI widgets and elements would be protocol-level '(X) Window' objects, in a whole tree of them. This was likely designed to allow various clever tricks to reduce client/server traffic, but it pretty much required server side rendering (of basic X graphic elements). It's now fallen by the wayside.