Which is why the next OS might be written by younglings who know little to nothing about "modern" OSes and just design from first principles, instead of being beholden to a gigantic historical architecture debt.

We're still running on kernels written in 1990. Time for an upgrade?

Communicating using a protocol from the 90ies, using a network stack from the 80ies, running an CPU architecture from the 70ies.

Being old and being unsuitable for its purpose are orthogonal.

we still use roads and wheels, which are positively antique.

I disagree. While some amount of stability is a precursor to usability, it does hold us back from progress. I posit we hit a [complexity] ceiling and we need to do a clean rewrite. Maybe hardware guys in the back can't, but we software people surely can.

You are not disagreeing with me.

Yeah, sorry for not expressing this clearly: I believe software also ages with literal time. Because the real world changes, and software ultimately runs in the real world. Being old and being unfit for its purpose are pretty much linked when it comes to software.

We still have banks running code even older than that. Do you want banks to take a large risk and potentially impact millions of people because "old code is bad code"? There is a time for an upgrade where things make sense. Not everything needs to be re-developed. We discovered fire a very long time ago. I don't think we need to retire fire because its so ancient.

I wholly believe it's impossible to get out of our "local minimum" without re developing from zero at some point.

So many of our technologies are just there because they solve some problem we created ourselves.

I don't think it's possible at all. Entertain the thought. If not for anything for social reasons. A hard fork of the entire ecosystem is the only way. Every single piece of software we write today depends on every other. It's not a tree like commonly thought, it's a cyclic graph.