I indeed wouldn't expect safe approach here to be necessarily efficient. But you aren't forced to make everything safe even if it's nicer. I've seen some Vulkan Rust wrappers before which tried to do that, but as you say it comes at some cost.

So I'd guess you can always use raw Vulkan bindings and deal with related unsafety and leave some areas that aren't tied to synchronization for safer logic.

Dealing with hardware in general is unsafe, and GPUs are so complex that it's sort of expected.