After going through a bunch of docs and making sure I had the right reference.
The "legacy" part of Vulkan that everyone on desktop is itching to drop (including popular tutorials) is renderpasses... which remain critical for performance on tiled GPUs where utilization of subpasses means major performance differences (also, major mobile GPUs have considerable differences in command submission which impact that as well)
Also pipelines and bindings. BDA, shader objects and dynamic rendering are just way better than the legacy Vulkan without these features.