I don't know the details myself but as a FYI... this famous answer covering the OpenGL vs DirectX history from StackExchange disagrees with your opinion and says OpenGL didn't keep up (ARB committee). It also mentions that the OpenGL implementation in Voodoo cards was incomplete and only enough to run Quake:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054...
The author of that answer is active on HN so maybe he'll chime in.
That brings back some memories... I remember having to pick the rendering pipeline on some games, like Quake.
I also remember the days of having to route the video cable from my graphics card to my 3dfx card then to my monitor.
You can still do that in some recent games, e.g. Doom 2016 and Half-Life: Alyx.