I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics programming since I do think it would be fun to build a game engine, but I will admit that even getting started with the low level Vulkan stuff is still scary to me.
I think what I want is something like how SDL does 2D graphics, but for 3D. My understanding is that for 3D in SDL you just drop into OpenGL or something, which isn't quite what I want.
Maybe WebGPU would be something I could have fun working on.
Plenty of people make minecraft-like games as their first engine. As far as voxel engines go, a minecraft clone is "hello, world."
I remember reading NeHe OpenGL tutorials about 23 years ago. I still believe it was one of the best tutorial series about anything in the way they were structured and how each tutorial built over knowledge acquired in previous ones.