> we need to throw away everything and start from scratch
This has already happened back in the 1990s with Plan 9 from Bell Labs[1] and Inferno[2], but it didn't take due to various factors. With Docker and Kubernetes we are slowly wrangling the current Linux ecosystem to be more akin to Plan 9 environment with private namespaces and networked environment, with "compute" and "storage" servers. But the issues these tools are trying to fix and improve are buried deep in the stack, at the kernel level - fixing them would mean throwing away years of work put into Linux and starting almost from scratch.
Plan 9 was definitely ahead of its time. The original authors learned from their UNIX choices back in the 1970s and looked into the future with a fresh set of eyes. Private process namespaces, lack of a superuser account with full privileges, transparent networking, split of the monolithic system architecture into CPU (compute), fileserver (storage) and terminal with CPU and storage being in the data center on a fast network and terminals being out there used by the users... I would say that this is pretty spot on with 2020s world where cloud and data centers are used almost all the time and end users rely on lightweight (both in a "weight" and in a "computing power" sense) devices to engage with the system at large.
Of course there were missteps as well, nobody's perfect. A byzantine graphical user interface with overfocus on the mouse (today's world overwhelmingly uses touch-based interface instead) probably hinders the newcomers the most. But apart from that, its hard to pick anyhing else that is wrong with the platform in the current world, and most of the things offered at the operating system level are very attractive in today's environment where user applications need to be protected from each other.
Today Plan 9 still lives on[3] and waits for its time to shine. If enough people are fed up with Kubernetes, I would hope that they could see the future elsewhere. There are definitely issues with current Plan 9 ecosystem and its forks that prevent many people to consider it for work, like its graphical interface stuck in the 1990s era when the rest of the computing world evolved and improved. But this can change, new graphical interface can be implemented to scratch someone's itch - that's how most of the current Linux server and desktop environments came to be. So I would say, look at what the OS provides, trim the bad parts away if you don't like them and start working in a fresh environment with good ideas.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
[3]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6m3GuoaxRNM