Like others have mentioned, it's just a huge deal in the data center now. With that comes a lot of influence by corporates interests.
Whereas BSD has gone the opposite way. Started by Berkeley but abandoned to the community. Business is not really interested in that because anything they contribute can be used by anyone for anything (even their competitors can use it in closed source code). Netflix was the biggest user but I don't think they contribute anymore either. WhatsApp used it until Facebook acquired them. That leaves netgate and ix systems which are small. Netgate pushed a really terrible wireguard once but it was nipped in the bud luckily. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice... It also highlighted many trust issues which have been improved since.
Of course whether this is an issue for you is very personal. For me it is but clearly for a lot more people it isn't, as Linux is s lot more popular.
Arguably, the only somewhat mainstream operating systems today that deserve that label are the *BSDs. Haiku OS gets an honorable mention but I wouldn't consider Haiku OS to be mainstream.
> Arguably, the only somewhat mainstream operating systems today that deserve that label are the *BSDs.
I think the word you're looking for is 'sidelined'.
But yeah grassroots was perhaps not the right term. I meant the status quo, not the origin. I don't know what the right word is then though.
Also no you are entirely unaffected by this unless you use a very specific and uncommon syscall.