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.

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

> 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.