Exactly this. Vulkan, especially Vulkan 1.0, was never really meant directly for graphics developers. It was meant specifically for engine developers that didn't want to have to deal with buggy and inconsistent drivers, e.g. Nvidia vs AMD vs crappy Android phones.
The solution Vulkan came up with was "make everything as explicit and user-controlled as possible", and leave "implementing a more user friendly driver" up to user-space, so that it could be tweaked by users, wouldn't be tied to driver updates users would never do, would be consistent across platforms, etc.
Except that never really happened. There are some graphics-driver-as-a-library projects (daxa, nabla, etc), but none with a large amount of community support.
Meanwhile GPU's evolved over time (AMD RDNA1, Nvidia Turing, Intel Arc, Apple Silicon), and it turns out that some of the choices Vulkan 1.0 bet on weren't great (explicit extensive pipeline state, binding model, render passes).
Vulkan 1.2/1.3 cleaned up a lot of this (dynamic state, descriptor indexing, sync v2), which also happens to improve ergonomics a lot to the point that it's much less painful to use Vulkan directly nowadays, as long as you're ok dropping support for older platforms.
