I am a fairly novice 3D programmer (but experience programmer) and Vulkan is much more complicated compared to OpenGL to even get the basic triangle working.
The basic idea was that you trade more upfront work against a much leaner and efficient render loop, which on its own isn't a bad idea (all modern 3D APIs do that). In Vulkan this idea is just badly executed (e.g. look at Metal for a much better - and much more programmer-friendly - implementation of that same idea).
I understand that. As someone that is doing this stuff for fun and wants something cross platform (Windows/Linux/BSD, I don't care about macs) with native code (C/C++) it just raises the bar a bit too high. I am sure I could figure it out, but it easily doubles the time needed to get going.
Perhaps because you should be using some kind of low/mid-level graphics engine. That's part of the difference between OpenGL and Vulcan: that ogl did more for you, even in immediate mode. Vk came about because getting more performance out of ogl was becoming difficult because it didn't directly expose enough of modern hardware, or only exposed it in a specific less-performant way.
Yes, it takes way more code to start from scratch on vulkan, but that's a trade-off against being able to better optimize exactly to your use case, if you need to.
I am burned out by frameworks in my day job which is basically working in full stack web land and I want to get away from that. So using anything other than libraries is out of the question as far I am concerned. I could have use Unity / Unreal and been further along, but it isn't going to be enjoyable.
I understand there are situations where more performance is desirable and that vulkan fills that niche. However if you are building simpler games, are you really going to need it? If I am building say a puzzle game, do I really need maximum 3D graphics fidelity and performance? I would argue probably not.
I am using OpenGL in my projects for now and if I feel the need to learn Vulkan I will. Almost all the materials online for OpenGL 3.3 are still relevant and unlike web world (where things are depreciated every 6 months) the code still works fine. The C++ linter / analysis tools I am using with CLion throw up warnings but these are normally fairly easily to fix.
