The entire point of Vulkan is that it’s a hardware abstraction. It was invented to offer an API around low level hardware operations rather than the typical approach of graphics libraries which come from the opposite direction.
But they’re significantly easier to target (less feature splitting) and much more ergonomic to develop with.
The way 3D rendering is done these days is drastically different from the days of OpenGL. The hardware is architecturally different, the approach people take to writing engines is different.
Also most people don’t even target the graphics API directly these days and instead use off the shelf 3D engines.
Vulkan was always intended to be low level. You have plenty of other APIs around still if you want something a little more abstracted.
Which is what graphics developers wanted.
The problems with OpenGL and DirectX 11 were that you had to fight the device drivers to find the "happy path" that would allow you the maximum performance. And you had zero hope of doing solid concurrency.
Vulkan and DirectX 12 directly expose the happy path and are incresingly exposing the vector units. If you want higher level, you use an engine.
For game developers, this is a much better world. The big problem is that if you happen to be an application developer, this new world sucks. There is nowhere near the amount of money sloshing around to produce a decent "application engine" like there are "game engines".