They aren't always wrong. But they also are not always right. And when they aren't right interesting things tend to happen that sometimes involve important changes.

Linux itself was a "misguided" project as Minix already existed for the low end and lots of UNIXen existed for the higher end. The exact same sentiments, plus a lot less charitable ones, were put forward back then.

And I remember people thinking me silly for working for a web search company in the late 90s "because Altavista already exists".

Rewrites are perhaps a misguided idea for people who are highly entrenched in a "worker" mentality. But there are other modes of thinking and working. There exist people with what one could call a "creator" mentality.

But I would distill one point from your post that I think is important: the goal of re-creating Linux may not be the correct goal. But I think staying close to Linux has merit. Usability over fashion has proven to be a deciding factor for success as far as design goes. The rest is down to leadership and organizational skill.

Rewrites of smallish mature software is hard more because of reliance on backwards compatibility — for such long-living programs, even certain bugs/strange behaviors are part of their specification.

I think it might be a good idea to examine whether there is indeed such a mentality. I suspect that much of this comes down to "tradition" (whatever that is) and convenience. In particular, what it takes to set up a build environment for the tools in userspace, and to package and distribute them.

For instance, how many people care that Docker and Kubernetes is written in Go? Does it have any practical consequence for the user? Would people notice if, say, Ubuntu were to distribute a `grep` that was written in Rust? Or better yet: if unixen were to adopt a replacement for grep that can be trusted to behave in a defined manner?

As for backwards compatibility, well, that ship has kind of sailed since you can't really trust utilities to behave the same way across systems and configurations. For instance if you change locale on machines things may start to behave differently.

("Back in the day", we used to lean quite heavily on "sort", "uniq" and "grep" and a few other utilities in a system that essentially was a hilbilly, shellscript version of map-reduce, and quickly found that these do not behave identically across UNIXen - or even across the exact same version of the same distribution if someone has messed with the locale. So we wrote our own versions of all of these small utilities and made them militantly ignorant of their surroundings. If I learned something from this exercise it is that any promises of "compatibility" are highly dubious and the design of these utilities isn't always so good that one wouldn't be served better by perhaps augmenting the menagerie of utilities with ones that have properly defined, and sensible, behaviors)