In the case of one project in paticular, that being the Sunshine game streaming project
That's a terrible example, because they completely ignore the many many years old standardized APIs (screen casting and remote desktop portals) that they could use, in favor of doing hacky and broken things that require root access instead.
It's not. There is no Wayland specific cursor format, it's all just images on disk, and the most widely used format hasn't changed away from Xcursors yet.
That's either a compositor or driver bug, please report it (as I've never seen that on Plasma, to your compositor first).
That's because it moves the X11 pointer but not the real one. A cursor theme can't change that.