However, if I log in and immediately log out, Wayland is available on the login screen and you log in to a Wayland session.
This is identical on both my laptops, they are very different in hardware and performance. This started happening after updates about 3 weeks ago.
I have looked at logs and I can see the subsystems trying Wayland and falling back to X but I can’t see an obvious reason (probably my lack of experience at this).
Anyone else experienced similar?
Yes, that happens a lot after updates to the nvidia packages. If you have nvidia GPUs, log in directly on a tty without a GUI session and roll them back to the version you had before.