zathura

I will have to try Zathura but since KDE is my choice of desktop environment Okular comes natural.

The author could hypothetically run Zathura through that setup in a pinch.

What does it provide that other options like zathura doesn't?

If Zathura works on X11 wouldn't it work with Xwayland?

I recommend sioyek if you need some highlighting functionality which is absent in zathura.

I prefer emacs for editing text, but modal vim-like interfaces for simple tasks such as browsing a document (zathura) or the web (vimperator).

Use Okular / Evince / Poppler / Sumatra / Zathura / whatever (actually, I think you might begin to see the problem already).

Of course Zathura + any backend works through XWayland.

Aren't tiling window managers, and the revival of vim-like keybindings (vimperator, zathura...) somehow a bit of response to this demand?

PDF readers I actually like: Zathura (obviously), sioyek (if you like customizability and Vim-like bindings, this is a good one!), and Skim.

I've been using zathura and it works quite well.

I'm pretty sure zathura works with wayland just fine.

A few PDF files were missed by file but flagged correctly by Magika; Zathura (muPDF backend) printed warnings about "repairing document" when opening, so these were malformed, but not so much that they wouldn't render.

My only graphical applications are Firefox and Zathura.

Zathura is amazing with the MuPDF backend.