It's weird how the 'next-gen' APIs will turn out to be failures in many ways imo. I think still as sizeable amount of graphics devs still stuck to the old way of doing things. I know a couple graphics wizards (who work on major AAA titles) who never liked Vulkan/DX12, and many engines haven't really been rebuilt to accomodate the 'new' way of doing graphics.

Ironically a lot of the time, these new APIs end up being slower in practice (something confirmed by gaming benchmarks), probably exactly because of the issues outlined in the article - having precompiled 'pipeline states', instead of the good ol state machine has forced devs to precompile a truly staggering amount of states, and even then sometimes compilation can occur, leading to these well known stutters.

The other issue is synchronization - as the article mentions how unnecessarily heavy Vulkan synchronization is, and devs aren't really experts or have the time to figure out when to use what kind of barrier, so they adopt a 'better be safe than sorry approach', leading to unneccessary flushes and pipeline stalls that can tank performance in real life workloads.

This is definitely a huge issue combined with the API complexity, leading many devs to use wrappers like the aforementioned SDL3, which is definitely very conservative when it comes to synchronization.

Old APIs with smart drivers could either figure this out better, or GPU driver devs looked at the workloads and patched up rendering manually on popular titles.

Additionally by the early to mid 10s, when these new APIs started getting released, a lot of crafty devs, together with new shader models and OpenGL extensions made it possible to render tens of thousands of varied and interesting objects, essentially the whole scene's worth, in a single draw call. The most sophisticated and complex of these was AZDO, which I'm not sure made it actually into a released games, but even with much less sophisticated approaches (and combined with ideas like PBR materials and deferred rendering), you could pretty much draw anything.

This meant much of the perf bottleneck of the old APIs disappeared.