Most people who deal with X resources, me included, generally deal with them at a relatively superficial level. At this level, you can say that X resources are a text based key/value database, with the name (key) of every resource being a composite name that specifies both its program and some program specific name (although there are conventions for the name portion). But if you start to look at the actual names for X resources, things start looking a little more odd.

Into the rabbit hole.

Also: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XResourcesFailure

One of the problems with X resources is that they’re arcane and hard to manage.