They really don't, no. Vulkan: 50 lines to allocate device memory. Cuda: One single line. What kind of extensive documentation stack do you want for functionality that is trivial in Cuda? And that exact issue continues through every little step of the way to your first usable application. I know there is VMA, it is a very poor solution to a problem that shouldn't even exist, and it only poorly addresses one of 100 parts of the API where Cuda is vastly simpler than Vulkan. Cuda also doesnt force you to use queue families but you can optionally use streams. No ridiculous descriptor management and binding in cuda, just passing pointers and handles via launch arguments. No overengineered explicit syncing mechanis in cuda, everything is nicely implicitly synced until you explicitly opt in to parallel streams. etc.
It's quite easy to set up a light abstraction layer with Vulkan where you simply use VMA, buffer device addresses and push constants for everything. No descriptor sets or bindings anything.
Alternatively you can use one of many abstraction layers that do this for you.
It absolutely isn't. After having spent 5 days not getting anything done in Vulkan, and being able to implement that same thing in a single day in Cuda (no prior experience in either API), I decided to never ever use Vulkan. It's a hopelessly overengineered API that is in dire need of a successor.
I may give it another try once it does not require a wrapper before it is remotely usable. I.e., once it has a single-line malloc without the need for third-party libs; default queues so I don't need to query and select queues; implicit sync by default and explicit sync by choice; NV-style bindless (i.e. no descriptors, just a handle); and so much more.
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