It is easier in some ways, agreed. I kinda miss the olden days of doing page flipping in DOS through EMS :) You're right, it was the wild wild west up until D3D and OGL standardized everything, and a big shift happened in the shift from fixed function to programmable pipelines. I love this kind of stuff!

I can still program mode 13h from memory, and I can only imagine the cool, arcane witchcraft that you have acquired having started much before me.

To me, at least, OpenGL was my favorite, I miss its death, but Metal, Vulkan and DX are close enough. What drives me up a wall is 3D in the browser, since the difficulties of dispatch cost from JS land are profound.