Raylib (https://www.raylib.com) is a better API than SDL for hobby 2D game development and here's an illustrative reason why: You cannot even draw a circle with SDL.

Look at all this! https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/tree/master/examples

If straying from native code then CanvasRenderingContext2D in the browser with JS/TS is good too, particularly because you can have hot-code-replacement during development by using e.g. Vite.