[bzzzt]

If you want the 'good old days' you can just take an old computer, emulator or 'simple' game engine which just exposes a few drawing primitives.

Vulkan or DirectX are made for current high-performance applications. Not stuff you put together on a sunday afternoon. They reflect the capabilities of today's hardware and therefore are complicated.

Engines like Godot expose some new concepts, but those are really not very complicated. You'll probably invent them on your own before finishing your first game. And then discover Godot developers did a better job after years of iterating.