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2/3rds of the library is dead code when working with Vulkan.
Also there's exactly 2 ways to get a window on Linux, and those 2 ways are common to pretty much every modern distro. Same as audio.
SDL2 is about the same amount of boilerplate code only in SDL_Thing form.
Now, if I was writing a game that needed to be shipped on everything possible and I can’t afford Unity or Unreal, SDL is a viable choice. MonoGame, mine, and others have used it, it’s battle tested.
I just can’t look at SDL code anymore and say “this is the cleanest api” for anything outside of C99.
That's almost nothing, its boilerplate you don't want to write. Which particular lib you grab that boilerplate from, SDL, GLFW, fucking GLEW, whatever, it doesn't matter. SDL is a widely accepted library for doing so and it's fine. If you want more complete input handling you'll be using the platform APIs directly.