The real benefits of DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Metal were that they let the API designers drop cruft and add new features. This was more significant for OpenGL->

The real benefits of DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Metal were that they let the API designers drop cruft and add new features. This was more significant for OpenGL->Vulkan and OpenGL->Metal than it was for DirectX 11->12 because OpenGL had more cruft and so much more surface area to get wrong. I'd still hesitate to say that Vulkan, DirectX, and Metal are lower level in any meaningful way. Most of the work the driver does/did, like shader/pipeline state compilation or command submission, is still there. Vulkan and DirectX just tie the driver's hands a bit, for better or worse inversely proportional to how good the driver stack is/was. Calling Vulkan lower-level than OpenGL is a bit like calling Java lower level than Javascript. We're still a long way from being able to shoot ourselves in the foot like we can with C. Unless you're using the more modern features of Metal like argument buffers and manual resource tracking, Metal is closer to late-stage OpenGL than it is to Vulkan or DirectX. Otherwise, they're about the same. I agree about the split between performance vs ergonomics, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Conceptually, the lower-level APIs expose functionality that make graphics programming much, much easier for large scale rendering engines. It's not just about performance. Most of the initial boilerplate amortizes away behind an abstraction layer anyway. What's exposed in web apis is still many years behind the state of the art in the native space. However, when it comes to just drawing a triangle with the techniques of 2010, personally I have a lot of hope for WebGPU. Besides functionality, the ergonomics problem of native apis are primarily down to tooling. Large game studios and engine devs can afford to invest in infrastructure that small hobbyists/indie devs can't.