`wgpu` in Rust is an excellent middle ground, matching the abstraction level of WebGPU. More capable than OpenGL, but you don’t have to deal with things like resource barriers and layout transitions.

The reason you don’t is that it does an amount of bookkeeping for you at runtime, only supports using a single, general queue per device, and several other limitations that only matter when you want to max out the capabilities of the hardware.

Vulkan is miserable, but several things are improved by using a few extensions supported by almost all relevant vendors. The misery mostly pays off, but there are a couple of cases where the API asks you for a lot of detail which all major drivers then happily go ahead ignore completely.

I'll definitely give wgpu a look. I don't need to make something that competes with Unreal 5 or anything, but I do think it would be neat to have my own engine.