I was reading about data driven renderer architecture and it was states that you'd submit a "drawcall" that has all it's necessary states selfcontained. But they also stated that you'd reset all states back to null afterwards so that no conflict remains.

Do they? I mean, both read about and implemented a similar renderer, but I don't remember reading about, nor did I actually reset all states to null after that call.

What they are probably talking about is that each drawcall should contain all possibly state settings, and those that are not specified explicitely ie. by the mesh/material are set to a default value. That still means that you will leave everything up after every drawcall, but since the next drawcall has all the necessary states, you can just set the states that actually changed (using redundant state checking). At least thats how I've read it and done it myself, and I also think resetting all states on the GPU-side after the draw-call is a pretty bad idea (if you want to keep the implementation simple, you can skip the redundant state checking and just set everything again for each draw - the API/GPU will already optimize the redundant calls, though at some cost at the CPU-side).

For DX11 I wrote RAII wrappers like this:

class OmBlendState
{
public:
    //blendFactor == nullptr => DX will use{ 1, 1, 1, 1 }
    OmBlendState(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11BlendState* blendState, const float* blendFactor = nullptr, unsigned sampleMask = 0xFFFFFFFF);
    ~OmBlendState();

private:
    const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& m_context;
};

OmBlendState::OmBlendState(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11BlendState* blendState, const float* blendFactor /*=nullptr*/, unsigned sampleMask /*=0xFFFFFFFF*/)
    : m_context{context}
{
    context->OMSetBlendState(blendState, blendFactor, sampleMask);
}

OmBlendState::~OmBlendState()
{
    m_context->OMSetBlendState(nullptr, nullptr, 0xFFFFFFFF);
}

Usage:

void TranspPass::Render()
{
    ...
    OmBlendState bs{ m_context, m_omAlphaBlendState.Get() };
    ...
    m_context->DrawIndexedInstanced(iaBuff.GetIndexCount(), static_cast<UINT>(instData.size()), 0, 0, 0);
}

Wrappers upon other states have different interface, for example RT:

class OmRenderTargets
{
public:
	//Max RTS - 8 (DX11 && DX12)
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv3, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv3, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv4, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv3, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv4, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv5, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv3, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv4, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv5, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv6, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);
	OmRenderTargets(const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& context, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv0, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv1, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv2, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv3, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv4, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv5, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv6, ID3D11RenderTargetView* rtv7, ID3D11DepthStencilView* pDepthStencilView);

	~OmRenderTargets();

private:
	const Microsoft::WRL::ComPtr<ID3D11DeviceContext>& m_context;
};

I do not use RAII wrappers upon Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader, IA, because it will be rewritten on next rendering stage.

But for GS/CS I always do.

So after each Rendering stage, pipeline is pretty clean and there is no need to reset states I did not touch.

This solution is better than having some "Reset all states" object.

As a bonus - Exception safe :)