I think the quote you're thinking of was a reference to modern OpenGL and Vulkan support, not accelerated graphics in general. Older OpenGL is a lot easier to implement, and sufficient for an accelerated desktop and games like Minecraft.
Marcan and Alyssa have been saying for a while that we were on track to get GPU acceleration in the near-ish future.
And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.
Basically, it's the way forward, not OpenGL.
Even amongst your list, I don’t see mass adoption of the applications today that don’t also have a GL backend.
Blender alone will be a gargantuan uplift to get to Vulkan because so much of the ecosystem is coded agains GL directly.
Meaning by the time it will be more usable, Vulkan will be more used as well.
And as above, if you implement Vulkan - you get OpenGL through Zink. If you implement OpenGL - you still have to implement Vulkan. So with limited resources, the first option looks way more effective.
They’re looking at it as a time to viable product perspective and a ROI.
These are often at odds within engineering , and it makes sense for them to pick their way because they already have a lot of the GL stuff done and it’s a faster route to a viable product.
Again, going for vulkan would mean they’d have to spend significantly more time up front.
You seem to be maximizing for not trying to do work (e.g implementing both Vulkan and OpenGL), but in many cases it’s better to get something stable and workable out.
Basically, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
So as a fun experiment, it can be interesting. As something practical - doesn't seem so until all pieces are in place.
This is about trying to get something daily drivable for most people in the most efficient way possible, and sometimes efficiency does mean implementing part of the tech stack twice if the first time unblocks you on other things.