Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up.

Vulkan isn't meant for beginners. It's a lot more verbose even if you know the fundamentals. Modern OpenGL would be good enough. If you have to use Vulkan, maybe use one of the libraries built on top of it (I use SDL3 for example). You still have freedom doing whatever you want with shaders and leave most of resource management to those libraries.