Though provoking article. I guess I’d have three points.
1. If the number of connections coming into a web server becomes too large, then just spawn multiple instances (probably virtual) and then load balance between them. In other words this really may not be as real a problem as the article would have you believe.
2. Running apps on bare metal - I mean you could do it but you’d have to reinvent a lot of wheels like memory management, tcp/ip stacks, disk i/o, semaphores and locks and the list goes on. At some point someone would say I can do all that low level stuff for you and you can focus on your app - so you’d be back to a kernel of one sort or another in pretty short order.
What might be interesting is to have a control plane that runs on top of a conventional kernel and a data plane that bypasses all that stuff and just retrieves the data. Not completely sure how that would work but I could roughly speaking imagine that.
3. The other practical thing that could be done is to try to optimize the pressure points in the existing kernels. Find a way to do lookups in constant or log time instead of O(N). This approach will likely happen.
I agree with your third point. I foresee the kernels evolving into something much more efficient, rather than the whole ecosystem changing.