Vulkan is actually really close in scope to the vendor-specific APIs that OpenGL drivers use to communicate with the GPU. The intention from the beginning was t

Vulkan is actually really close in scope to the vendor-specific APIs that OpenGL drivers use to communicate with the GPU. The intention from the beginning was that you would pick an appropriate higher-level abstraction (unless you're, say, making Unreal Engine and already retooled your OpenGL pipeline for the AZDO extensions). The clear advantage over OpenGL is that those abstractions are debuggable and vendor-independent.