As my understanding, it’s a change in the API way of passing things and specifying rendering states…the core things are the same…added geometry shaders which is exposed in OpenGL 2.1 already by extensions. You don’t like extensions because of HW vendors…there r only 2 major gaming vendors…the caps are in the Shading language itself…so the hardware is hardware binaries are binaries but different interfaces…then I will go for OpenGL.
Sometimes, hype has no reason.
Extensions or not, certain features can’t be viable until the required hardware reached a certain saturation among the public.
By that time these features are probably booth standardized and core in the APIs.
Therefore hype like that has little or no point other than the ad value.