I don't think OpenGL and vulkan are interchangeable in this case. I wouldn't really recommend a beginner to start with vulkan. Yes, OpenGL might have some "outdated" concepts compared to vulkan but I don't think throwing someone directly to vulkan is more productive!

Plus, tutorials and in depth guides are much much more common on OpenGL, but that's probably a chicken/egg type of situation.

Yeah both options are bad for beginners, at least for cross-platform 3D APIs (e.g. D3D11 and Metal are both nicely balanced and well-designed 3D APIs, but restricted to Windows or macOS).

As other have said, WebGPU is probably the best cross-platform option right now.

(also IME the tricky thing with GL information on the web is that there's a lot of really outdated and sometimes conflicting information around - e.g. worst case is you end up with code that mixes old and new GL concepts without realizing what's what)

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.