This sounds completely agreeable in GPU programming. It's not feasible to provide elegant one liner solutions. It's about managing a state for a quite complex

This sounds completely agreeable in GPU programming. It's not feasible to provide elegant one liner solutions. It's about managing a state for a quite complex piece of hardware and the exact point of Vulkan was to provide a bare-metal low-overhead API without complicated utility routines. So yes, it's supposed to be like that.