Just a bit of response to that list and claim that no library aims to port more of GDAL in a lazy way - there is osgeo.gdal/ogr - that is very nearly GDAL-complete, and includes multidimensional mode for rasters, including its ability to cast from "classic (2D) raster" to mdim, and vice versa
It's a problem that sits occluded by the user-package 'rasterio', we've had a very similar problem in R for a long time (rgdal, now sf/terra as representative of the underlying library), but now we have gdalraster, with much better API fidelity (and includes vector, despite the name, and we've made good progress on multidim too).
I'm surprised this is still a languishing topic, but I'd recommend Python/xarray folks look hard at the built-in library that GDAL ships with, and especially with the new cli (released in 3.11) that provides a lot more flexibility and consistency to craft abstracted pipelines without even rendering to VRT.