The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to developing cool things on top.
It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if there's no marketing behind it.
Just one data-point, but WhatsApp engineering was adamant that FreeBSD was a key precursor that allowed them to scale 2m+ connections per host on their (rather beefy) boxes: https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M
> It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant.
True. I've seen many promising projects die/stagnate at the hands of unpopularity, *BSDs wouldn't be the first. Sigh.
And right now you just have a huge network effect around containers + linux: the tooling + support is the most compelling reason to "suck it up" and just fire up Ubuntu and call it a day.
Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.