There are several examples where something like this has gone horribly wrong. High level API's for "common use cases" tend to work only for writing one page examples for text books but are completely useless for anything more serious. One example of this is the CUDA API. They have a low level C API, which gives you a good but a little verbose programming API (because GPGPU is complicated). Then there's a high level API where you write the GPU code mixed together with the CPU C++ code. It somewhat worked for the examples in the Cuda manual but was useless for anything else.
OpenGL did have a library called GLU that did some high level things such as quadrics (for spheres, cylinders, etc) and tesselation of polygons. It was completely written on the CPU on top of OpenGL. It worked decently for some stuff. Direct3D has also some helpers, f.ex. to do some matrix math and load 3d models.
A library like OpenGL is probably best left to be a low level API for a low level task. A high level API in this case would be a 3d engine on top of OpenGL and there are plenty of those out there.
