I had the same perspective on this. I spent some time building up a 2d graphics library from zero, primarily for drawing very simple UIs on resource-constrained devices.

I initially tried using D3D/Win32 APIs to perform the high-level drawing operations for me, but found that for the scope of functionality that I required, these interfaces were far too heavy-handed. These also have lots of platform-specific requirements and mountains of arcane frustrations to fight off.

I didn't need to interface with some complex geometry or shader pipeline in hardware. Raytracing is hilariously out of scope. I really just needed a dead simple way to draw basic primitives to a 2d array of RGB bytes and then get that to the display device as quickly as possible. What I ended up with is something that isnt capable of very much, but can run on any platform and without a dedicated GPU. I also feel like this was a much better learning experience than if I had slammed my head into the D3D/opengl/et. al. wall.

This is true, but DirectX 11, Metal and modern OpenGL (without cutting edge extensions) are still very accessible to novices, not to mention that you can transfer knowledge between the three of them, so there's little cost in learning a second/third API.

Vulkan and DX12 however are the work of the devil.

I understand that Vulcan adds a lot of complexity, but OpenGL and Direct3D are surprisingly finite. Once you learn the graphics pipeline, it’s not too hard to begin drawing things. Init window and device, fill vertex and index buffers, load textures, load vertex and pixel shaders, set each of these things as the active thing, draw. Of course you can also explore the extents of all these entities until the sun engulfs earth. Even though I’ve been at it for 30 years, I realized long ago I would never keep up with, learn, and implement every notable technique even if I did nothing else for the rest of my life. But drawing nice looking, animated 3D things is very tractable.