...which is then often too opinionated and bloated for specific use cases. E.g. nobody in their right mind would use Unity for a simple 3D viewer application.
No one outside AAA studios cares about Vulkan, and Khronos had to come up with ANARI to try to move visualization companies out of OpenGL/DirectX into Vulkan.
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That is a wrapper library, middleware means more richer tooling and development experience.
At very minimum something like Ogre3d or Open Inventor.
...which is then often too opinionated and bloated for specific use cases. E.g. nobody in their right mind would use Unity for a simple 3D viewer application.
You would be surprised.
No one outside AAA studios cares about Vulkan, and Khronos had to come up with ANARI to try to move visualization companies out of OpenGL/DirectX into Vulkan.
Nobody in their right mind would use 'raw' Vulkan either for a simple 3D viewer. But that's exactly why thin wrapper libraries are important.
A simple 3d viewer should just use WebGL. Low level APIs are targeted at large game engine developers.