I agree, but that only reinforces the point that there doesn't even seem to be much of a difference between the older graphical pipeline and a 100% compute pipe

I agree, but that only reinforces the point that there doesn't even seem to be much of a difference between the older graphical pipeline and a 100% compute pipeline. If graphics drivers could just allow compute shaders to manually call the rasterizer and give functionality to control what data stays in memory in different parts of a pipeline/command-buffer, then you'd be able to implement both the older graphical pipeline and the newer task/mesh shader pipeline entirely in compute shaders. I'm not entirely experienced in how graphics hardware works at a lower level though, so I'm sure I must be missing something important.