There was an earlier version of the underlying 3d engine that used only Canvas. WebGL use is justified like this:
Once I actually got that working doing all of the math by hand in JavaScript I decided that using WebGL would probably be worth it, and actually probably wasn't cheating all that much. WebGL exposes access to the GPU-enabled rendering engine through JavaScript. While it does abstract away some of the rendering, it's less than I thought---it just supports the ability to do the necessary math efficiently---so I decided this wouldn't be cheating. And fortunately, it didn't take long to reproduce the initial renderer, but this time supporting much better (and more efficient) graphics.
That makes sense: As far as I understand, OpenGL 2.0 and beyond don’t really provide much fixed-function/predefined logic anymore, e.g. I believe you need to provide your own vertex and pixel shaders.
You could argue that rasterization itself is being taken care by the implementation, though.
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There was an earlier version of the underlying 3d engine that used only Canvas. WebGL use is justified like this:
From: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2019/3d-renderer-javasc...
That makes sense: As far as I understand, OpenGL 2.0 and beyond don’t really provide much fixed-function/predefined logic anymore, e.g. I believe you need to provide your own vertex and pixel shaders.
You could argue that rasterization itself is being taken care by the implementation, though.