In the Rust gamedev community WebGPU has become the de facto API for us to use through the wgpu crate. You don't get all the bells and whistles that you would get working with a backend API directly but being able to recompile to Windows, Mac, and Linux targets and having things just work is unimaginably cool.
Pardon my ignorance as this is not my world at all but what's this look like in practice?
Are they web apps packaged for desktop apps like Electron apps but using WASM?
wgpu implements just the webgpu part, it's not a full browser with html/css/js/etc. All of the code is native, and the abstraction is pretty thin.
This. Everything is written in native Rust and wgpu has all of the FFI stuff built into it so we don't really have to worry.