> unimportant implementation detail that should be assessed on performance alone rather than usability

I disagree. Usability is important, or you end up with garbage like Vulkan. I'd rather have 99% of the performance for 100% usability, than 100% of the performance for 5% of the usability.

Unfortunately when it comes to graphics APIs, the choices are between bad and worse, which is why I switched to doing real time rendering in CUDA. Easier to write a fast software rasterizer in cuda, than to draw a single triangle in Vulkan