Yeah, Vulkan is shedding most of the abstractions off. Buffers are no longer needed - just device addresses. Shaders don't need to be baked into a pipeline - you can use shader objects. Even images rarely provide any speedup advantages over buffers, since texel cache is no longer separate from memory cache.

GPUs these days have massive cache often hundreds of megabytes large, on top of an already absurd amount of registers. A random read will often load a full cacheline into a register and keep it there, reusing it as needed between invocations.