I mean sure you can do a generic layer and common denominator stuff, basically the kinda stuff webgpu or those rendering abstractions do and that's fair enough, it works well for simpler stuff!

The problem really is that if you do that you'll end up with random weird stalls or perf problems you can't really debug sadly :\

Re GL ye glUniform is usually much faster because you just do a lot less, you're writing a small amount of data directly into constant memory, it doesn't need resource tracking. UBOs / constant buffers come back to the theoretically slow but can-be-made-faster-with-driver-heuristics approach...i.e. if you see a small UBO which is only used as a UBO, you get the same direct constant bank upload

On NV it's quite fast, on AMD it's not really optimised, on intel just use buffersubdata because everything else sucks....