It's not particularly abstract if you consider the hardware it was originally designed for. But GPUs have changed since then and all the modern features feel a bit awkward.
I spent one weekend going through the official Khronos tutorial for Vulcan, and wrote (understood, then typed -- as opposed to copy+pasted) the bare minimum necessary to get a triangle on the screen: it came to 900+ lines of code.
Vulcan is not at all like an "enhanced OpenGL" -- it's for experts to leverage while designing the next generation of high-performance graphics libraries.