> fewer workarounds because the driver is doing something "clever" hidden behind the scenes.

I would be very surprised if current Vulkan drivers are any different in this regard, and if yes then probably only because Vulkan isn't as popular as D3D for PC games.

Vulkan is in a weird place that it promised a low-level explicit API close to the hardware, but then still doesn't really match any concrete GPU architecture and it still needs to abstract over very different GPU architectures.

At the very least there should have been different APIs for desktop and mobile GPUs (not that the GL vs GLES split was great, but at least that way the requirements for mobile GPUs don't hold back the desktop API).

And then there's the issue that also ruined OpenGL: the vendor extension mess.