Other then that the one big downside of WebGPU is the rigid binding model via baked BindGroup objects. This is both inflexible and slow when any sort of 'dynamism' is needed because you end up creating and destroying BindGroup objects in the hot path.

Vulkan's binding model will really only be fixed properly with the very new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension (https://docs.vulkan.org/features/latest/features/proposals/V...).

The WebGPU API gets you to rendering your first triangle quicker and without thinking about vendor-specific APIs and histories of their extensions. It's designed to be fully checkable in browsers, so if you mess up you generally get errors caught before they crash your GPU drivers :)

The downside is that it's the lowest common denominator, so it always lags behind what you can do directly in DX or VK. It was late to get subgroups, and now it's late to get bindless resources. When you target desktops, wgpu can cheat and expose more features that haven't landed in browsers yet, but of course that takes you back to the vendor API fragmentation.

The scientific folks don't have all that much reason to upgrade from OpenGL (it still works, after all), and the games folks are often targeting even newer DX/Vulkan/Metal features that aren't supported by WebGPU yet (for example, hardware-accelerated raytracing)

But he was doing that on his work time and did so collaborating with other Mozilla engineers, whereas AFAIK blade has been more of a personal side project.