[LukeShu]

Plan 9 definitely wasn't built with the thought that the endgame was ever more powerful desktops doing most things locally. "Connected over a network to send and receive files" is only technically true, yeah it's all around the 9P protocol which is a filesystem protocol, but it's a world where everything is a file. A window on your screen is a file. A CPU is a file. And app is a directory with files in it. The Plan 9 vision is all the things you describe, but more seamless. Firing up a a surreally large cloud machine isn't starting a VM with its own separate OS and configuration, it's connecting to a cloud CPU and your tasks transparently running on it. Mostl applications running on a cluster of machines that expose an HTTP interface to your browser are instead applications running on a cluster of machines that expose a 9P interface to your OS. Your impression of "the endgame was having ever more powerful desktops who did most things locally" was the Unix trajectory, and steering away from that was the big departure of Plan 9 from Unix.