It's not that messy when you remember that this is the one area left in contemporary programming where you're almost directly talking to hardware which knows on

It's not that messy when you remember that this is the one area left in contemporary programming where you're almost directly talking to hardware which knows only the most basic primitives but can do them blazing fast and where minor coding decisions can have huge performance impacts... remember assembler/C in the olden days for normal software? What a mess. Hey, I'm already glad the shader language is a simplified version of C rather than pure assembly -- in fact, earlier I heard that the very first generations of shaders were indeed assembly-like, glad we advanced since then. There are many many frameworks that "take away the pains of core WebGL coding" and give you "as easy as jQuery" higher-level JS APIs on top of WebGL. But you get the most control over your own hardware-accelerated program if you write it directly in WebGL. It's not too complicated, only most of us aren't used the real concepts in computer graphics.