TL;DR; It has to work blazingly fast on all kinds of GPUs, which are not nearly as homogeneous as you might expect. The complex setup is the "lowest common deno

TL;DR; It has to work blazingly fast on all kinds of GPUs, which are not nearly as homogeneous as you might expect. The complex setup is the "lowest common denominator" of that ecosystem. GPUs are stupendously good at ridiculously wide parallel processing, yet you still need to sequence these operations. Modern Graphics API setups like Vulkan and WebGPU are the currently best known way to write such systems. Shaders express the parallel algorithms, and the pipelines binds and synchronizes them together. It's just legitimately the best way, as far as we know, to get the most bang out of your buck for that hardware while remaining vendor-agnostic. Anyways, a higher-level abstraction can always be built on top that provides you with the UX you desire, and we will see a bunch of them for WebGPU soon enough.