It's intended to be used with MoltenVK to support arbitrary
`VkComponentMapping` settings. The idea is that MoltenVK will pass a
buffer (which it set to some buffer index that isn't being used)
containing packed versions of the `VkComponentMapping` struct, one for
each sampled image.
Yes, this is horribly ugly. It is unfortunately necessary. Much of the
ugliness is to support swizzling gather operations, where we need to
alter the component that the gather operates on--something complicated
by the `gather()` method requiring the passed-in component to be a
constant expression. It doesn't even support swizzling gathers on depth
textures, though I could add that if it turns out we need it.