The boilerplate is boilerplate because there are a few exceptional cases in scope where you might do something slightly differently. Since you can't completely abstract it out, it becomes boilerplate of some form. Either you're using boilerplate to set up a configuration object to feed into an initializer, or you're using initialization boilerplate.
It turns out that with graphics APIs, you actually have to layer many, many abstractions on top before you get into useful territory, which is why I'd say that 99% of use cases are better off using a high level library/engine even if all you want to do is draw a few things.
I've written my own graphics engines on top of OpenGL, and in my experience the set of people "whose needs are not met by an existing library, framework or game engine" is actually much slimmer than that set of people might think. Sure, Unity or Unreal or even Ogre3D might be overkill and might not give you all of the nuances you need, but they actually make some excellent abstractions that are well worth the tradeoffs and workarounds.
In most cases, if you need to do "custom stuff" that a "mid level" engine like Ogre3D offers, either your project is so sophisticated that it's worth redoing boilerplate, or you're asking for more than you really need, or you just want the fun of building your own engine, because it's really a lot of fun. What Unity and Unreal add on top of that are even more abstractions and tools for an entire production pipeline of artists, modelers, and programmers. But they do a great job of covering the vast majority of use cases. It's like if you told me that your application asks for things jQuery can't do... I'd question what kind of situation you're in that jQuery does things incompatibly.
This post though, about shaders, has a point regardless of OpenGL boilerplate. Shaders suck everywhere, even in engines. You're probably writing your own shaders that do 90% of what most shaders do and 10% of specifically what you needed, and you're probably trying to work through all of the complexities of "uniform" variables and how other bits and pieces of the rendering pipeline fit together. That part always sucks regardless of OpenGL, D3D, Unity, Unreal, etc.