The problem with OpenGL isn't so much that its programming model is outdated, but that it is an incredibly confusing and (in many places) just plain badly designed API (just look at VAOs, it's hard to come up with a more broken and useless feature - some of the problems have been salvaged on more recent OpenGL versions, but those are not portable to macOS or GLES3.x).

Another (related) problem is that the many sediment layers that have accumulated over nearly three decades are not clearly separated (and Vulkan is starting to suffer from the same problem btw, there's always at least five different ways to do the same thing, three of which are outdated or not recommended to be used on specific GPU architectures, and the other two have complicated relationships and interdependencies with other redundant or optional features, it's apparently some sort of Khronos curse to always create the biggest possible mess when it comes to 3D APIs).

On Windows (maybe even on Linux via Proton), starting with D3D11 makes a lot more sense, or on macOS with Metal v1. Both APIs are 'close enough' to modern 3D APIs to carry a lot of the knowledge over, but without being too low-level like Vulkan or D3D12, WebGPU running in browsers is also a good choice (even though it inherits some bad design decisions from Vulkan 1.0 when it comes to resource bindings, and is in some places actually slower than WebGL2).

I think the dark side of OpenGL for beginning graphics programming is that debugging can be really frustrating! I really think learnopengl.com should have a mandatory section for how to use RenderDoc (https://renderdoc.org/) - it's night and day if you know how to use it.

DX11 suffers from the problem that there aren't that much high quality material comparable to learnopengl.com - I really don't like RasterTek which just dumps code at you without explaining things properly. Same for Metal - the best way would be to just download and read the example source code from the official Apple site, but it's rather unfriendly for beginners.