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> The core problem with the modern apis is that they are so incredibly complicated that they will kill any newbie on the spot.

I would agree if by modern you mean DX12 or Vulkan, but WebGPU (and maybe even Metal) are quite decent.

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Webgpu is the worst of both worlds. Significantly more complicated than opengl yet not capable of many "essential" modern techniques like bindless resources.

If you must use a modern api to learn for whatever reason, go with vulkan and use dynamic rendering and buffer device addressing.

WebGPU has the issue that feature/capability-wise it is essentially 5 years behind OpenGL 4.6, which came out 8 years ago. And the other downside being that it adopted old Vulkan concepts that even Vulkan started to ditch, like render passes and static pipelines.

Without any sort of proper debugging tools.

For beginners that's irrelevant. WebGPU has more than enough features for beginners to learn about graphics programming. Not just that, once you're used to WebGPU, going to Vulkan will be much easier than the transition from OpenGL.

I wouldnt recommend anyone going to Vulkan, though. It's pretty much the worst graphics API out there, and WebGPU is mimicking outdated Vulkan design decisions that even Vulkan is currently outphasing, like render passes and static pipelines.

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