Interesting, for a while the guidance for a while was to learn webgpu instead unless you needed all that extra control. Do you think these changes modify that guidance?
With WebGPU/wgpu you don't get mesh shaders, ray tracing or shader subgroup/wave/warp operations. Its feature set is comparable to Vulkan 1.0, and Vulkan has progressed a lot since.
And WebGPU still requires all the RenderPass setup code which is a lot of boilerplate that Vulkan no longer requires.
Subgroups may seem like a minor feature, but they can unlock huge performance. I recently had a 10x perf boost with a very basic subgroup trick to let neighboring pixels collaborate on some expensive operations in fragment shaders. And there's another 5x in there waiting for me to implement some subgroup quad tricks.
WebGPU (or Metal if you're in Apple land) still has a much gentler learning curve. The simplifications to Vulkan weren't really aimed at making it easier to use, just streamlining parts of the API which turned out to be needlessly complex, so the parts that are complex for a reason are still just as complex.
Aside from performance there's also just more hardware features exposed via Vulkan, as a sibling mentioned if you want to do anything with raytracing for example then you will have to graduate to Vulkan in order to take advantage of hardware acceleration.
