There are times when it is legitimately true, but it's far easier to say that your would have been amazing efforts were blocked because you needed obscure feature of prototype GPU than it is to accept you were never going to get close in the first place for completely different reasons.
Even WebGL 2 is only equivalent of GLES 3.1 (and that's maybe a low 4.1 desktop GL equivalent). I think my "software" raytracing for desktop GL was only feasible with GL 4.3 or GL 4.4 if i remember correctly (And even those are kinda ancient).
For what?
This is exactly what I am talking about: successful 3D products don’t need raytracing or GI, the bulk of the audience doesn’t care, as shown by the popularity of the Switch. Sure those things might be nice but people act like they are roadblocks.
But also, I'm pretty sure that even the Switch 1 has far more capable graphics than WebGL 2. Doom Eternal is ported to it and reading a frame teardown someone did they mentioned that parts of it are using compute.
Yes, you can do fairly cool stuff for a majority of people but old API's also means that you will spend far more time to get something halfway decent (older worse API's just takes more time to do things with than the modern ones).
I do think we're due for a new wave of web-based gaming though, web audio just wasn't near maturity when Flash went and the mobile/steam/xbindie marketplaces still worked for indies. But now with all the crowding and algorithm changes people are hurting and I think it might just be a little spark needed for a major shift to occur.