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I've always felt that OpenGL was too abstract for graphics novices; perhaps this tiny subset of GL will change that.

It's not particularly abstract if you consider the hardware it was originally designed for. But GPUs have changed since then and all the modern features feel a bit awkward.

Would you say modern alternatives are any better? (looking at you, Vulcan)

I spent one weekend going through the official Khronos tutorial for Vulcan, and wrote (understood, then typed -- as opposed to copy+pasted) the bare minimum necessary to get a triangle on the screen: it came to 900+ lines of code.

Vulcan is not at all like an "enhanced OpenGL" -- it's for experts to leverage while designing the next generation of high-performance graphics libraries.

Triangle-on-screen using OpenGL is on the order of ~100 lines:

https://github.com/genpfault/glfw-mcve-base/blob/master/src/...

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