> Strangely enough we managed to write portable code across platforms during the last century,

Yep, that argument always seems strange too me. Do people fear that much to design their own interface and hook to each platform ecosystem? You look at something like the BSD which runs brought one single kernel concept and various subsystems across a variety of hardware. And somethine like libao[0], which provides a common interface to various sound system.

Whatever the app, if you care enough, you can abstract the core features away from the GUI and other various dependencies.

[0]: https://xiph.org/ao/