OpenGL is a terrible, awful, crufty API, and the reason those methods were removed is that they are comically suboptimal. They do not reflect anything remotely like modern card capabilities
But the guys who wrote it weren't idiots. They were in fact super smart engineers working at the cutting edge company of the day, SGI. And they made a philosophical call, which was that OpenGL should be an abstraction of geometry and an idealized rendering pipeline with just enough hardware-specific hackery in it to make it perform[1]. They did the best they could operating under the constraints of the state-of-the-art of the time and the resources they had available. And people still use OpenGL, decades later, and have done amazing things with it.
Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Kids these days, talking about legacy technologies, would be wise to remember that.
[1] Whereas Microsoft believed in an abstraction of physical hardware, with just enough geometry in to make it useful.
Thats not at all true. The original OpenGL API is very much a direct mapping of the original SGI graphics hardware. Most openGL calls on SGI are single cpu instructions feeding the data to the hardware, which fully implements the whole OpenGL state machine.
Its just that modern GPUs work in completely different ways, so this kind of API is useless for them.
But the guys who wrote it weren't idiots. They were in fact super smart engineers working at the cutting edge company of the day, SGI. And they made a philosophical call, which was that OpenGL should be an abstraction of geometry and an idealized rendering pipeline with just enough hardware-specific hackery in it to make it perform[1]. They did the best they could operating under the constraints of the state-of-the-art of the time and the resources they had available. And people still use OpenGL, decades later, and have done amazing things with it.
Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Kids these days, talking about legacy technologies, would be wise to remember that.
[1] Whereas Microsoft believed in an abstraction of physical hardware, with just enough geometry in to make it useful.