OpenGL has been deprecated on everything but Android, Windows, Linux, and PS4. Vulkan is the new open standard modeled after Metal (macos, ios) and DirectX 12 (windows,xbox). Vulkan, like Metal and DX12, offer direct memory access to GPU resources. Modern OpenGL (buffers and vao’s) is close to what vulkan is but vulkan takes it further. With command queues for multithreaded rendering and everything is a buffer. Indices, vertices, shader uniforms, everything.

WebGPU (wgpu) is another abstraction on top of all of them that I feel is the modern bgfx, that is, a modern abstraction of those buffers and queues that work across DX12, Metal, and Vulkan. If you aren’t in the graphics space, I would skip learning vulkan and learn webgpu wgpu-native.