As the other comment mentioned, this is still true if you want to support legacy graphics APIs. A non-negligible amount (~20%) of Android phones cannot execute compute pipelines as they only support OpenGL ES 3.0 - compute shaders were introduced in GLES 3.1.

While it is an headache if you want to support compute on legacy devices, I do think that writing regular vertex/fragment shaders for general purpose GPU computation is an underrated pleasure as you really need to break out the coding golf toolkit to squeeze out maximum performance.