Crazy things can be done once you learn it though. It's just math underneath. You don't need to know the math per se but understand what's going on under the hood, what is "world coordinates" vs "local coordinates" vs "device normal coordinates". What is a material, a texture, a light source (how many can I use at once in a single pass?), what is a pass?, what is culling, what is a face, index, weight, or bone? All 3d programs, whether it's 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Unity, Unreal, Three.js, all share a pretty similar concept of these things. Some abstract it further into just a buffer (vulkan, metal, wgpu) that you can do with as you please on the gpu side.
I had some fun just the other day making earth (again) in three.js (https://gabereiser.github.io/earth) with physically accurate shaders. Once you learn, it's actually really fun.
Crazy things can be done once you learn it though. It's just math underneath. You don't need to know the math per se but understand what's going on under the hood, what is "world coordinates" vs "local coordinates" vs "device normal coordinates". What is a material, a texture, a light source (how many can I use at once in a single pass?), what is a pass?, what is culling, what is a face, index, weight, or bone? All 3d programs, whether it's 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Unity, Unreal, Three.js, all share a pretty similar concept of these things. Some abstract it further into just a buffer (vulkan, metal, wgpu) that you can do with as you please on the gpu side.
I had some fun just the other day making earth (again) in three.js (https://gabereiser.github.io/earth) with physically accurate shaders. Once you learn, it's actually really fun.