I used to be big into Khronos API camp, even did my project thesis in OpenGL, up to the famous Long Peaks fail.

Vulkan ended up being the same extension spaghetti as its predecessor, and Khronos was only able to come up with something thanks to AMD offering Mantle, C++ bindings and a GLSL successor only came to be thanks to NVidia (Vulkan-hpp and Slang started at NVidia).

The "we build the specification", and then "the community builds the tools", leads to very poor experiences, and if it wasn't for LunarG own interests, there wouldn't even exist any kind of Vulkan SDK.

What they have going is naturally the vendor independence, however we can achieve the same with middleware with the benefit of much better developer experience.