Going entirely back to the granular GL-style state soup would have significant 'usability problems'. It's too easy to accidentially leak incorrect state from a previous draw call.

IMHO a small number of immutable state objects is the best middle ground (similar to D3D11 or Metal, but reshuffled like described in Seb's post).

Not using static pipelines does not imply having to use a global state machine like OpenGL. You could also make an API that uses a struct for rasterizer configs and pass it as an argument to a multi draw call. I would have actually preferred that over all the individual setters in Vulkan's dynamic rendering approach.