Comment by BigJono

I can give a bit more context as someone that got on WebGL, then WebGPU, and is now picking up Vulkan for the first time.

The problem is that GPU hardware is rapidly changing to enable easier development while still having low level control. With ReBAR for example you can just take a pointer into gigabytes of GPU memory and pump data into it as if it was plain old RAM with barely any performance loss. 100 lines of bullshit suddenly turn into a one line memcpy.

Vulkan is changing to support all this stuff, but the Vulkan API was (a) designed when it didn't exist and is (b) fucking awful. I know that might be a hot take, and I'm still going to use it for serious projects because there's nothing better right now, but the same extensibility that makes it possible for Vulkan to just pivot huge parts of the API to support new stuff also makes it dogshit to use day to day, the code patterns are terrible and it feels like you're constantly compromising on readability at every turn because there is simply zero good options for how to format your code.

WebGPU doesn't have those problems, I quite liked it as an API. But it's based on a snapshot of these other APIs right at the moment before all this work has been done to simplify graphics programming as a whole. And trying to bolt new stuff onto WebGPU in the same way Vulkan is doing is going to end up turning WebGPU into a bloated pile of crap right alongside it.

If you're coming from WebGL, WebGPU is going to feel like an upgrade (or at least it did for me). But now that I've seen a taste of the future I'm pretty sure WebGPU is dead on arrival, it just had horrendous timing, took too long to develop, and now it's backed into a corner. And in the same vein, I don't think extending Vulkan is the way forward, it feels like a pretty big shift is happening right now and IMO that really should involve overhauls at the software/library level too. I don't have experience with DX12 or Metal but I wouldn't be surprised if all 3 go bye bye soon and get replaced with something new that is way simpler to develop with and reflects the current state of hardware and driver capabilities.