I'm mostly with you, and for the record have both used OpenGL and Vulkan professionally in shipped titles. I personally have no interest in going back to OpenGL.
But I think the disconnect is that neither you nor me have any reason to fear Vulkan. I love how explicit Vulkan is and that the spec is in such depth, the only thing that comes close imho are the proprietary console APIs. I've also worked with Metal and DirectX and the documentation for those is just bad, you kinda have to know what you are doing already to understand the scraps of information you get and reason about the unspoken implementation details.
That all being said though, the Vulkan spec and setup is just daunting for a beginner. And yeah, you can take a lot of shortcuts like not pre-building your PSOs or being lax with your barriers and memory handling. But I feel like you might as well just not use Vulkan in that case since you are throwing away some of its biggest advantages. Just AZDO it up and take advantage of the IHVs having spent decades beating on their OpenGL implementation (as long as we don't count the red team). A lot of Vulkan is just boilerplate and easy to-do and abstract away, but doing Vulkan right, that's the hard part in my opinion.
Not to mention that it's really easy to build insidious gotchas into your code that are really hard to spot. Nvidia famously just doesn't care about image layouts, so if you just develop on Nvidia hardware it can be pretty easy to write code runs as if it was correct, but will explode on hardware that does care about image layouts. I have a drawer full of GPUs from different IHVs and generations just for day to day development. That's a really high barrier to entry.
But I think the disconnect is that neither you nor me have any reason to fear Vulkan. I love how explicit Vulkan is and that the spec is in such depth, the only thing that comes close imho are the proprietary console APIs. I've also worked with Metal and DirectX and the documentation for those is just bad, you kinda have to know what you are doing already to understand the scraps of information you get and reason about the unspoken implementation details.
That all being said though, the Vulkan spec and setup is just daunting for a beginner. And yeah, you can take a lot of shortcuts like not pre-building your PSOs or being lax with your barriers and memory handling. But I feel like you might as well just not use Vulkan in that case since you are throwing away some of its biggest advantages. Just AZDO it up and take advantage of the IHVs having spent decades beating on their OpenGL implementation (as long as we don't count the red team). A lot of Vulkan is just boilerplate and easy to-do and abstract away, but doing Vulkan right, that's the hard part in my opinion.
Not to mention that it's really easy to build insidious gotchas into your code that are really hard to spot. Nvidia famously just doesn't care about image layouts, so if you just develop on Nvidia hardware it can be pretty easy to write code runs as if it was correct, but will explode on hardware that does care about image layouts. I have a drawer full of GPUs from different IHVs and generations just for day to day development. That's a really high barrier to entry.