You have good questions in your comment, and I think he is calling out for searching answers to them and other similar questions. Apparently, the operating system researchers haven't been doing this enough, or at all. His speech is a lament for this state of affairs, and a call to get excited about finding out what benefits would be gained by doing things (very) differently.

But that's just my take, and I'm not working on operating systems research.

That's what basic research does. It discovers new things, and new ways of doing things.

On the radio side of things, Dash7 firmware will run on many Lora devices, meaning you don't have to use the proprietary Lora software.

One method could be, say, extending microkernel capability systems to incorporate these remote processors. Or perhaps even the ability to provide WASM or ePBF control blocks to customize the power management system. Though its true that'd require more engineering resources.

Actually USB is somewhat like this in that there's a hardware api and spec that the OS knows about. Linux has troubles with even that in my experience (often requiring a reboot to fix.

Maybe, instead of opening up all that complexity, simply making better ways to fake a dumb component would be more effective. (That is with verified, memory safe parsers and API interfaces. Then it doesn't matter what other gunk it has behind that interface.)

And this could be implemented as yet another managed layer between the main CPU that runs user space and the hardware SoC. (Basically a low-level "WAF".) Yeah, it's a herculean task, but at least we have access to the Linux drivers.

The whole combined experience just makes things run so smoothly and allows security issues to be patched since Apple has the resources that maintain each part internally.

Though maybe we'll have a RedHat of hardware someday.

I think a “true” OS would run its code on all these processors, implementing both sides of the communication protocols connecting these pieces of hardware into a computer.

For one, such hypothetical OS may upgrade or replace these communication protocols with OS updates, or because user changed some system preferences.

This also allows to re-configure these things based on runtime information. For instance, when AC power is disconnected from a battery-powered device, it makes sense to do stuff slightly differently, like stop all processes on all CPUs who are polling to get events faster, and switch to slower but energy efficient interrupts.