But at this point I'm thinking that it would have been way better if they had just added storage buffers and compute shaders to webgl.
There was a planned compute shader update for WebGL2, but AFAIK it has been abandondend in favour of WebGPU:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/bPD47...
It would have made sense 5 years ago when it wasn't clear that WebGPU would be delayed for so long, but now that WebGPU support in browsers is actually close to the finish line it's probably not worth the hassle.