It actually requires translation everywhere. GPUs have their own internal API that Vulkan, OpenGL, DirectX, etc. translate into. That is what drivers do.

That's being disingenuous. Of course a high level api has to be implemented in terms of hardware specifics, but you're implying, hopefully unintentionally, that that hardware interface is Metal, and it's not.

You can run Vulkan on Apple Silicon as natively as you can run Metal, even if some parts of it don't map too nicely to the hardware.

We only seriously say translate when we go from one high level API to another, just like we call some compilers transpilers even though literally everything is a compiler for something.