Raylib has definitely helped inspire me to get back into things! But AFAIK it's pretty much 'direct mode' only and primarily 2D, whereas I wanted to go for a more 3d oriented scene graph approach.
I do dig raylib's 'DrawModel' command and briefly considered using a more direct approach like that, but it can't handle multiple passes for things like transparency so the user would end up having to write their own 'scene' system anyway. Besides, as you say, there's already Raylib! It runs on a ridiculous number of languages too, mainly thanks to 3rd party support, there're probably Fortran and COBOL versions out there somewhere!
I've never heard of sokol_gfx (will do) but I did take a look at bgfx and although it's very nicely done and apparently works very well, I was after something a bit more modern, and Webgpu is (apparently) modelled on the way modern gpu's work while offering a high-ish level interface so I went with that. Also, the fact it's a google thing means they're gonna make sure it works well on as wide a range of hardware as possible. I've been following development quite closely, and the people writing it go to a huge amount of effort to make sure the stuff they're adding really will work everywhere.
I actually think the use of 'native webgpu' drivers like dawn and gfx-rs (the rust version in firefox) could take off in a big way, as they turn behemoths like d3d12 and vulkan into a much more usable API: https://webgpu.rocks/reference/interface/gpudevice/#idl-gpudevice