Great article. The description of how they handle shaders is just bonkers to me.

Is that really what you’d have to go through to have a working system with plugin shaders from 3rd parties on multiple backends? Or is mostly the result of time and trying to keep backwards compatibility with existing plugins?

Telling external devs “Write a copy in every shader language” would certainly be easier for the core team but that’s obviously undesirable.

Transpiling shaders is what most game engines have done for a decade now. Everybody thinks it's stupid in that field as well, but there is no viable alternative.