That is explicitly not a goal of the WebGPU working group. They have acknowledged that WebGPU will make 3D graphics programming in the browser significantly harder. But it will make supporting the 3D graphics API in the browser easier for the browser developers.
So basically, because Apple took over a decade to finally unsqueeze their tight fingers enough to dedicate any developers to WebGL2 in Safari, instead of improving the site developer experience, the W3C has opted to take huge swaths of responsibility away from browser developers and foist it on site devs.
The "hope" is that middle-tier libraries like Three.js and Babylon.js will hide the complexity away. I'm sure they will, and by all my experiences with them, will do a fine job of it. But it's certainly not the direction I hoped things would go.
WebGPU is more explicit, but I wouldn't say it's significantly harder. Sure, if you just want to get a triangle on the screen, it's going to take more lines of code. But everyone builds their own abstractions over the base API, and once you get to that point it's about the same ease-of-use.
And that knowledge from the WebGPU API can extend to the desktop with something like Rust's WGPU, where you can author a 3D app once and get a Vulkan, DirectX, Metal, _or_ OpenGL targeted version.
In my opinion if we're going to have a stable and a consistent API, I'm totally ok if it's going to be significantly harder. I think we should not need a middle-tier library for creating 3d graphics. Most of the time We needed threejs or twgl for mapping the shader inputs (uniforms etc) with javascript. The rest of it is just pure matrix math, that we do in 2d graphics as well.
It's worth to mention that they're also going to create another shading language. https://www.w3.org/TR/WGSL/
The API may get harder, but that's not a huge deal. Not saying that's a good thing, but APIs are far from the hardest thing in 3D graphics.
In my experience using WebGL, the hardest thing is all the missing parts compared to modern APIs and the fact that, whenever you want to implement something, you can't use the newest techniques and have to go hunting around to find out how the game dev community used to do things 20 years ago. I would take a jump in API complexity in exchange for access to a modern graphics pipeline and I'm excited by the new opportunities WebGPU will afford my work.
That is explicitly not a goal of the WebGPU working group. They have acknowledged that WebGPU will make 3D graphics programming in the browser significantly harder. But it will make supporting the 3D graphics API in the browser easier for the browser developers.
So basically, because Apple took over a decade to finally unsqueeze their tight fingers enough to dedicate any developers to WebGL2 in Safari, instead of improving the site developer experience, the W3C has opted to take huge swaths of responsibility away from browser developers and foist it on site devs.
The "hope" is that middle-tier libraries like Three.js and Babylon.js will hide the complexity away. I'm sure they will, and by all my experiences with them, will do a fine job of it. But it's certainly not the direction I hoped things would go.