The 'bad' parts in WebGPU (anything related to BindGroups) are actually coming from Vulkan 1.0, while the 'good parts' are taken mostly from Metal.

WGSL vs SPIRV is really just a side issue that people want to focus on but doesn't really matter much in the bigger picture.

> Vulkan 1.0 Possibly even from Vulkan's Mantle days?

IIRC AMDs hardware had already adopted a fully bindless model by the time they were developing Mantle, so probably not. Vulkan 1.0 had to go backwards in terms of complexity to accommodate a wider range of hardware, with mobile causing the most pain.

Modern Vulkan code doesn't even use bind groups anymore. For buffers you just push the device address as a push constant and for textures you push the index of a single large texture array