He's talking about research, so you have to look at the state of the art, not what the masses were still using. In 2000 I used FreeBSD, which was pretty good. It had jails [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail] by then, which a reasonable person might still prefer to modern Linux containers.
Windows 2000 also existed at that time, was widely used, and was basically straight out of the future. It had:
NTFS 3.0 with file encryption support
Logical disk management for dynamic disks & expansion of a logical partition over multiple physical disks. Without a reformat.
Distributed file systems & hierarchical storage management.
MMC with group policy control, active directory, centralized event viewer for OS & application events, and system service management
Speaking of which, system services were a thing that actually existed and were managed (systemd fighting still continues, so Linux still hasn't "caught up" on this)
Plug & Play ACPI support (technically windows 98 was the first to support this but it was so broken it was a joke - Linux lagged by a few years and didn't really support it until 2.6).