Gnome was a major lever in making it hard for other distros to avoid systemd, early on. The way Wayland's been structured and that... transition, such as it is, has been managed, smells a whole lot like a fire-and-motion move, and besides, dominance there was necessary to keep Mir from winning as the successor to X-Window and making it possible for Ubuntu to follow Red Hat's playbook and use it to push some of their other, deeper-in-the-stack projects (they'd have been neatly positioned to interfere with both Systemd and Gnome, had they won). I don't think Red Hat would let Ubuntu push anything of note, at this point, without countering it, for (justified!) fear of their own tactics being turned on them.
Systemd's the main body of Red Hat's army here, if you will—no doubt that's the most important part of all this—but other projects have played other important roles in supporting or defending it, at times.
It's not like Red Hat planned and schemed to execute on Wayland as a plan for domination, but their decision to support Wayland as an existing project with technical merit staffed by skilled people might well have been tactical for the reason you mention.
Some people tend to imagine the first situation and rightly dismiss it as a post facto conspiration but the second situation is utterly realistic. They may even not have realized until much later how right they got.
And I say that as someone who is convinced we need something like Wayland, the sooner the better. But we also have to avoid being naive about how business is done.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
Systemd's the main body of Red Hat's army here, if you will—no doubt that's the most important part of all this—but other projects have played other important roles in supporting or defending it, at times.