There are tons of places within the GPU where dedicated fixed function hardware provides massive speedups within the relevant pipelines (rasterization, raytracing). The different shader types are designed to fit inbetween those stages. Abandoning this hardware would lead to a massive performance regression.
Offtop, but sorry, I can't resist. "Inbetween" is not a word. I started seeing many people having trouble with prepositions lately, for some unknown reason.
> “Inbetween” is never written as one word. If you have seen it written in this way before, it is a simple typo or misspelling. You should not use it in this way because it is not grammatically correct as the noun phrase or the adjective form.
https://grammarhow.com/in-between-in-between-or-inbetween/
Oh, it's a transliteration of Russian "офтоп", which itself started as a borrowing of "off-topic" from English (but as a noun instead of an adjective/stative) and then went some natural linguistic developments, namely loss of a hyphen and degemination, surface analysis of the trailing "-ic" as Russian suffix "-ик" [0], and its subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form.
>subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form
Also called a "back-formation". FWIF I don't think the existence of corrupted words automatically justifies more corruptions nor does the fact that it is a corruption automatically invalidate it. When language among a group evolves, everyone speaking that language is affected, which is why written language reads pretty differently looking back every 50 years or so, in both formal and informal writing. Therefore language changes should have buy-in from all users.
Either the present perfect that you suggest or the past perfect originally presented is correct, and the denotation is basically identical. The connotation is slightly different, as the past perfect puts more emphasis on the "started...lately" and the emergent nature of the phenomenon, and the present perfect on the ongoing state of what was started, but there’s no giant difference.
