I feel like we're talking on two different levels here.

It's sort of like how Oak was this neat virtual machine for running on a early 90s PDA prototype. Then the writers of that VM realized that they had written a really general purpose VM, cleaned it up and released the first Java.

This general of a VM (talking about eBPF now) hasn't been a first class citizen of a mainstream kernel before. The devs are taking a very cautious approach (as they should), but ultimately eBPF is way bigger than a tracing tool. I wouldn't be surprised to see nearly everything you currently do with a kernel module ultimately being allowed by eBPF too. Maybe more like emulating other OS's kernels as easily as you'd start another container.