I don't know how this lie caught on so well, but it doesn't pass the smell test.
_Vendors_ did it poorly, which is why everyone wanted to get away from them. You could argue they over-corrected and left _too_ much to the user, but better safe than sorry.
Sure users can write bad code as well, but at least it's _consistently_ bad, and fully under their control. There are so many fewer problems nowadays like "oh it works on my desktop, but on this older intel GPU for a user with outdated drivers it segfaults in the driver, and there's nothing we can do to fix it ourselves".
Implying that up to date Intel drivers don't segfault on perfectly valid OpenGL use.
We don’t need to speculate whether hardware vendors can ship bullet proof drivers and API implementations, they have already proven they can’t. Vulkan was built based on industry experience from organisations big enough to sit at the Khronos table. They were trying to give the vendors as little rope to hang themselves on by reducing the complexity of driver implementation because these stakeholders (large AAA studios) were collectively expending massive resources working around vendors inability to ship good quality drivers. This problem is still ongoing even with Vulkan.
Vulkan drivers on Android are a complete joke. They barely work and I’m debugging and working around a new driver bug or performance trap every few weeks at this rate. If we can’t rely on quality Vulkan drivers, an API designed to make drivers easier to implement, how will vendors fare with a much more complex to implement API like OpenGL? (poorly, look up the history of OpenGLES3).
Desktop PC is the exception because it’s the only GPU market where hardware vendors have real market pressure to deliver working drivers. Just look at Intel’s Arc launch, a product where it’s single biggest criticism and flaw citied universally is driver issues. There is no other market where this same pressure has been applied. Nobody bought a phone specifically because it had “good GPU drivers”. Unless the hardware market a vendor is selling to cares garbage drivers are the default. Qualcomm and Arm provide more than enough proof for that.
