alt Hacker News> tons of drivers that dont implement the extensions that really improve things.
This isn't really the case, at least on desktop side.
All three desktop GPU vendors support Vulkan 1.4 (or most of the features via extensions) on all major platforms even on really old hardware (e.g. Intel Skylake is 10+ years old and has all the latest Vulkan features). Even Apple + MoltenVK is pretty good.
Even mobile GPU vendors have pretty good support in their latest drivers.
The biggest issue is that Android consumer devices don't get GPU driver updates so they're not available to the general public.
Neither do laptops, where not using the driver from the OEM with whatver custom code they added can lead to interesting experiences, like power configuration going bad, not able to handle the mixed GPU setups, and so on.