They (the Cocos dev team) are doing native Metal first, and the discussion has moved to another topic.
Progress of new backend API .
My interest in other options is for both cocos2d games that can’t upgrade to 3.18+ for whatever reason, other games/apps that are currently written in pure OpenGL. Mostly it’d be useful for inactive projects whether old game, a toy/demo project, or say a GUI library you want to use that are written for GL.
It’d take little effort to get running with one of these proxy layers, whereas it may take many weeks to port the rendering code over to run on Metal/Vulkan/DX drivers.
If you replied about new projects then yes you’d start with Vulkan or Metal or DX12 depending on your desired set of release platforms. Or for full cross-platform games you’d just use Unity/Unreal and not worry about this topic. Cocos2d-x will eventually be an option once the Metal and Vulkan rendering back-ends are completed.
(I could’ve posted this in my own private notes, but decided here on the off chance someone finds it useful)