Started messing around with Bevy (https://bevy.org) which scratches some of the lower level itch I’m looking for but has enough utility things that I can spin up things kinda quick.
In this case just made a first person flying camera and loaded in a scene I made in blender, rendered it red and added a light.

It looks really nice, maybe I’ll make a whole game using this style. Here’s the level in blender.

Still want to make a quick doom clone.

I’ll push the code here: https://github.com/wfkolb/shoot_em_first