Vulkan is both a good and bad example.
Vulkan tries to remove the "bloat" of the driver by moving it into the engine (or the middleware the engine uses), which, yes, reimplements a pretty sizable chunk of what the driver used to do.
But it exposes the API in a way that requires domain-specific knowledge of how modern GPUs work, which requires, frankly, smarter engine developers. They need to stop only thinking in the ways OGL/D3D taught them to think, and need to also think like a driver developer, or possibly even a compiler developer.
OpenGL was written wrong because no one knew what modern GPUs would eventually look like, and tried to solve the problem at the wrong layer; and fixed function hardware worked pretty much the way OpenGL worked in the beginning, not realizing stuff would eventually become, basically, absolutely massive highly parallel DSP-esque math coprocessors that are more complex than the system that hosts it. OpenGL became a mess because they kept bolting newer styles of hardware onto it (VBOs/IBOs/VAOs, the eventual move to unified buffers, compute shaders, fixed function geometry then non-fixed function geometry shaders, ubershaders and the move from direct to deferred back to direct, etc)