I'm a 'small guy'. Only person working on my game engine. Would love to add vulkan support, except my GPU is fried.

That's the difference right here. If you are in business of making engine then yes you can benefit basing your engine on something like Vulcan. To me: I am not exactly doing games/engines. I do use hardware accelerated graphics for some other type of development. OGL/DirectX are already a nuisance enough for me (just a friggin too that I want to use and forget). Having to go even lower level will not make me any happy at all. Well that is unless I find suitable rendering library. Hopefully some candidates are available now, just have to find time to evaluate.