What's wrong with using middleware engines? That was pretty much the expected case for people who didn't /need/ the level of control exposed by APIs like vulkan or dx12.

It's pretty much what OpenGL "drivers" were doing past the introduction of hardware shaders anyway - acting as a pretty thick middleware translating that to low-level commands, only having the user API being locked into a design from decades ago.

And considering how hard it was to get Khronos to eventually agree on vulkan in the first place (that effectively being a drop from AMD in "Mantle" then only tweaked by the committee), I'm not surprised they haven't standardized a higher-level API. So third party middleware it is.

Nothing, middleware is exactly why most game studios hardly care about religious discussions regarding 3D APIs, as in FOSS circles.

I guess the problem is the expectation exactly by those that feel GL and DX 11 are done, and they need to directly use their replacements.

> now everyone has to deal with such complexity directly, or make use of a middleware engine instead

You don't really have to though, you can still use the higher-level older graphics APIs. It wouldn't have made much sense for Vulkan to include a high-level graphics API as well, as those APIs already exist and have mature ecosystems.

Similarly, in Windows land, you aren't forced to use D3D12, you can still use D3D11 or even D3D9.

Kind of, many developers feel they are using legacy deprecated APIs, especially given how they are referred to in some circles.

Naturally that leads to some uncomfort.