Tbf, a lot of the complexity (also in the official Khronos samples) is caused by insane C++ abstraction layers and 'helper frameworks' on top of the actual Vulkan C API.

Just directly talking to the C API in the tutorials/examples instead of custom wrapper code would be a lot more helpful since you'd don't need to sift through the custom abstraction layers (even if it would be slightly more code).

E.g. have a look at the code snippets in here and weep in despair ;)

https://docs.vulkan.org/tutorial/latest/03_Drawing_a_triangl...