E.g. without Metal as example of what a modern user-friendly 3D API can look like, WebGPU would probably look very different, and not in a good way.

My personal hope is that the concept of a "3D API" will eventually disappear into compilers like Clang and GCC and their standard libs.

E.g. WebGPU has a pretty big API surface just for ensuring that the CPU-provided data is compatible with what the GPU expects, and any mismatches manifest as runtime errors, not compile-time errors.

Most of this API surface would simply disappear if the same compiler can see both the CPU and GPU side code, integrated into the same compilation process.