Your mention of a "universal API" reminded me of the paper "Some Were Meant for C" [1] in which the author argues that one of the most important feature of C is its "communicative design", i.e., its ability to manipulate any memory -- whether this memory originates from the program or is foreign -- with the usual C operators (+, *, [], <<, >>, etc.)
[1] https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/papers/kell17some...