[api]

That is the standard conservative incrementalist position about systems. I think it's a denial of the efficacy of conceptual thought.

It often stems from an analogy to biological evolution, but evolution is a geological-timescale process that occurs over aeons. To use it as a guide to cultural, social, and engineering progress is the naturalistic fallacy not to mention a bit of a category error.

That being said -- I do consider the challenging of the "crappy old OS + virtualization" paradigm unlikely due to the lack of a strong financial incentive to do the work. The amount of work required is waaaaay beyond amateur open source hacker thresholds.

It's possible that this lack of a financial incentive betrays a lack of overall value incentive. Maybe containerization + virtualization, while ugly and ham-fisted, is "good enough" and a more elegant approach just wouldn't have enough "win" to it. A similar situation exists with languages like D, Go, and Rust vs C++. They're better, but they're probably not better enough to displace the incumbent. Peter Thiel's rule on competition (from the incredible book Zero to One) is that an upstart alternative usually has to be 10X better to "disrupt" an established market. I can't imagine a polished-up Plan9-ish OS being 10X better than Linux+Docker+KVM on important metrics. A new OS would have to be 10X as productive to program, 10X less time consuming to admin, 10X more efficient at the use of hardware, 10X more secure, or some combination thereof that amounts to a 10X win.