Not necessarily.
Most desktop OS compositors provide a void** buffer that can be blitted to. Sure, this buffer will probably end up going through the compositor which does GPU hardware acceleration anyway, but it is definitely possible to shrink the application-side stack without relying on D2D/GLUT/GLEW/GLFW/SDL/WGPU in this case.
On Windows: CreateDIBSection and BitBlt
On macOS: CALayer and CATransaction commit
Not sure about Linux, too many stacks involved.
> Not sure about Linux, too many stacks involved.
Wayland: wl_shm and that’s it for the “stack”.
Cross-platform support can be more difficult in that case, but yes it is possible.