2D graphics is very different and mostly doesn't require the GPU's assistance. If you want to plot a circle on an image and then display that to the screen, you don't require any of this stack. If you want a high-level library that will draw a circle for you, you can use something like Skia or Cairo which will wrap this for you into a C API.
GPUs solve problems of much larger scale, and so the stack has evolved over time to meet the needs of those applications. All this power and corresponding complexity has been introduced for a reason, I assure you.
> 2D graphics is very different and mostly doesn't require the GPU's assistance.
There are interesting tasks in 2D graphics that may easily warrant GPU acceleration, such as smooth animation of composited surfaces (even something as simple as displaying a mouse pointer falls under this, and is accelerated in most systems) or rendering complex shapes including text.
GPUs solve problems of much larger scale, and so the stack has evolved over time to meet the needs of those applications. All this power and corresponding complexity has been introduced for a reason, I assure you.