That's what bothers me though; why not have an official higher level API that's less awful to use? Instead you get a bunch of third party libraries bolted on top of everything.
Why though? Khronos doesn't have the best record of API design and there's plenty of other projects that are much higher level and simpler to use for a newbie developer. You can scroll just a bit up and see just how many webdevs end up using webgpu which is closer to the abstraction they prefer.