@alcinnz Hello again!
I came across the following today and remembered this old thread:
https://github.com/PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv
It's a shared-source Windows 3.1 display driver targeting VESA BIOS extensions. My x86 asm is too rusty to get into the weeds of it, but seems to confirm the earlier article's claim of needing to reimplement the entire graphics stack in each driver!
(I'm not entirely sure what its license is since several parts of it are listed as copyright Microsoft)