Not to downplay it or anything, but I'm curious why webgpu is receiving so much attention? There have been many low-level cross-platform graphics abstractions over the years. The bgfx [1] project had its first commit ~12 years ago and it's still going! It's much more mature than webgpu. I'm guessing being W3C backed is what's propelling it?
webgpu is a modern graphics API for modern GPUs to replace/complement these two APIs in the browser: WebGL (a very limited outdated subset of OpenGL) and Canvas (basically WinAPI drawing from 2000s)
It's heavily influenced by Metal (based on original work by Apple and Mozilla).
People are talking about it because it's on the web and it's finally something modern to work with.
TBF, WebGPU is at least a decade behind too. For instance it implements a Vulkan-style rigid render pipeline model which even Vulkan is moving away from because it turned out too rigid. So once WebGPU becomes mainstream it may very well be the most "awkward" 3D API.
My perspective is it’s a couple things. Mainly because it’s backed by several implementations with market pressure to deliver high quality working implementations (wgpu in Firefox, Dawn in Chrome). Not saying bgfx or others are bad, but the Chrome team will be putting in a lot of work for you to make sure Dawn works well everywhere Chrome needs to be. That plus it’s super portable. First time in a long time that we could truly be looking at a “write once run anywhere” GPU API. It also fills OpenGL’s niche by being much more approachable than Vulkan. I guess this really just adds up to it being the “OpenGL 2” a lot of people have been wanting in light of Vulkan’s complexity and weaker portability.
One remarkable feature of WebGPU is that it has no undefined behaviour, traditional 3D APIs are riddled with subtle UB. It also receives much better testing across all sorts of hardware and driver configs, just by being integrated with web browsers.
[1] https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx