IIRC back in the day it was criticized for having unnecessary abstractions and limitations that were seemingly arbitrary.

For instance, you can't restart an oscillator node. Once you call stop it's the end. A node that's stopped is also immediately disconnected.

ScriptProcessorNode, broadly speaking, sucked, because it was running in the main thread:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ScriptProce...

so eventually it was replaced with AudioWorkletNode combined with AudioWorkletProcessor:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AudioWorkle...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AudioWorkle...

Arguably people would have been happy having just these two from the get go.

Compare this to an API that was already mainstream back when Web Audio API was first developed:

https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_dev_portal/pages/Techn...