D3 is not remotely an abstraction API for a hardware compute engine. Vulkan isn't about "configurability", it's about cleanly expressing the specific operations that the hardware can perform, and the specific requirements for talking to it. Those are complicated, inherently. Data graphing, fundamentally, is "simple" in comparison (and to be fair, D3 exploits that beautifully).
I agree, but it is not fair to compare D3 and highcharts because they are not in the same league.
There are many higher level libraries leveraging on D3 that could be compared to highcharts. There are also many lower level libraries that have the same scope as D3, and compared to most of them D3 is pretty concise - the parent comment has a point.