Nobody forgot about batching. It's a foundational strategy in any efficient realtime renderer. The bar has simply moved and even the cheaper binding logic you get from Vulkan or D3D12 is getting too expensive for the object counts we're trying to push in modern games.

Bindless lets you reduce the amount of book keeping you have to do per-object on the CPU, but much more importantly opens the door for GPU driven rendering.

The problem with WebGPU is there's no bindless and the 'bindful' path is quite expensive to meet the safety requirements of a browser API. There's no way around the slow path, and the slow path is quite slow. In this case the workaround is cut features because the API simply imposes too much overhead.

BindGroups being a hard to fix design wart is true indeed (which I have been complaining about pretty much from the beginning, not because of the performance problems - which surprised me too - but because of their inflexibility compared to a traditional bindslot based model like in Metal1 or D3D11).

But I would prefer to first bring the peformance of the slot-based binding model to a point where it is similar to D3D11 or Metal instead of ignoring that part of the API and 'skipping ahead' to bindless (which will probably have to be behind an extension anyway). Otherwise WebGPU will become a cemetery of abandondend attempts like OpenGL.