No-one claims that gamedevs see lock-in as something positive; only that very few AAA gamedev shops care about lock-in - especially for a relatively small part

No-one claims that gamedevs see lock-in as something positive; only that very few AAA gamedev shops care about lock-in - especially for a relatively small part of the production pipeline as a graphics API. What you see as locked-in API, others see as a great feature set to build on, probably with access to driver developers to help reach even further, past publicly available APIs. A game engine is not something you can switch out of easily anyway. Everything from game code, to years of asset libraries to decades of source control repositories - all of those are very rigid parts of the production pipeline.