Sadly, Vulkan is really painful way of learning graphics programming. Doing almost anything requires large amounts of boilerplate. Almost everything you need to do, for example to make shadows, requires just 10x more code than the technique fundamentally requires.

For learning graphics programming, in my opinion, writing software renderers is much more enjoyable path. Code is less, the code you write touches fundamental and not boilerplate. Downside is that code will be slower as you will lose HW acceleration.