There's plenty of blame to go around, but if any one faction is responsible for the Vulkan mess it's the mobile GPU vendors and Khronos' willingness to compromise for their sake at every turn. Huge amounts of API surface was dedicated to accommodating limitations that only existed on mobile architectures, and earlier versions of Vulkan insisted on doing things the mobile way even if you knew your software was only ever going to run on desktop.

Thankfully later versions have added escape hatches which bypass much of that unnecessary bureaucracy, but it was grim for a while, and all that early API cruft is still there to confuse newcomers.