It depends on what you mean by “graphics programming”. If that means “implement a game on top of a tall stack of abstractions” then sure, this isn’t the answer

It depends on what you mean by “graphics programming”. If that means “implement a game on top of a tall stack of abstractions” then sure, this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but I’d call that “game programming”. If “graphics programming” is implementing the rendering engine for the game (recall his final goal is “draw a triangle”), I believe his point is that it’s easier to learn the required APIs for that if you understand the concepts behind them first (rather than just leaping into meaningless copypasta), and the best way to learn those concepts is to work with them directly.