WebGPU is the common cross-section of the modern 3D APIs (Metal, D3D12 and Vulkan). In general, and somewhat simplified, those APIs move all the expensive render-pipeline-configuration out of the render loop and into the initialization phase. So your code is much more "front-loaded" than GL, but once everything's initialized, the actual rendering is much less code and has much less overhead because most render-state has been pre-compiled into immutable objects. OpenGL on the other hand is a highly dynamic state machine where flipping a single "switch" can lead to expensive reconfiguration of the render pipeline during rendering.

I've been using wgpu for quite some time (in D, through wgpu-native bindings). What exactly do you find it horrifying? It's much closer to DX12/Vulkan than OpenGL. The main difference is that it introduces the concept of a render pipeline, encapsulating all render state from shaders used, shader input layouts, vertex layouts, depth/stencil states, color attachments, which can be pre-created and then bound with a single API call. It's a big improvement over OpenGL which required you to track the state yourself or pre-emptively restore most of the state to avoid side effects between calls.

132 lines for hello world (helloTriangle), just so much boiler plate.

I cannot pin it down but there must be a better way, this looks like the server world before the invention of ruby on rails.

Also magical values in string format:

primitiveTopology: 'triangle-list', const swapChainFormat = 'bgra8unorm'; ...

Have you seen a Vulkan "Hello Triangle" in comparison? That's a least a thousand lines of code, and that's with taking shortcuts :)

132 lines isn't really that much for a triangle in any 3D API, except 90's style OpenGL 1.x (which was a nice and convenient API, but also very inefficient).

I'm sure there will be plenty of high-level Javascript libraries built on top of WebGPU which will cater to different philosophies and use cases, and those will also allow a Hello Triangle with fewer lines of code (but also will involve compromises at flexibility or performance).

Does Javascript have enums? I've seen these stringly typed enums often in JS APIs.

...at least the native WebGPU C-API has "proper" enums for those.

Typescript does have enums