What happened was wgpu, which runs on top of Vulkan and can also run on the web as web gpu
Many Rust programs are written against wgpu rather than Vulkan
Many Rust programs are written against wgpu rather than Vulkan
The unfortunate reality is that wgpu does not have enough funding. Extremely valuable features like bindless, multi queue, and mesh shaders/raytracing are missing. CPU-overhead is fairly high. Things like debugging support are not great. Having to abstract over all of Vulkan/DX12/Metal brings difficulties.
I love wgpu, and don't begrudge the volunteer devs (they've done a lot of amazing work already), but I'm also frequently frustrated by its limitations.
Lots of people say that wgpu is lacking in comparison to vulkan (specially because it has gpu features from circa 2015), but how do you compare it to opengl?
OpenGL 4 has some more advanced features like bindless that WebGPU lacks (and Vulkan has), but I wouldn't use OpenGL because of that.
My recommendation is start with WebGPU if you're new to graphics programming. Once you're at the end point where you have a bunch of working features and have optimized your engine as much as you can, and are starting to push against WebGPU limits, then I would think about switching to Vulkan 1.3 / DirectX 12.