What's wrong with using middleware engines? That was pretty much the expected case for people who didn't /need/ the level of control exposed by APIs like vulkan or dx12.

It's pretty much what OpenGL "drivers" were doing past the introduction of hardware shaders anyway - acting as a pretty thick middleware translating that to low-level commands, only having the user API being locked into a design from decades ago.

And considering how hard it was to get Khronos to eventually agree on vulkan in the first place (that effectively being a drop from AMD in "Mantle" then only tweaked by the committee), I'm not surprised they haven't standardized a higher-level API. So third party middleware it is.