I have always enjoyed that essay, it reminds me of something my Dad once said to me, "Cannibal's don't realize they are cannibals." It wasn't strictly true of course but it tried to capture the essence that if you've grown up in a society where X is the norm, you don't know what living in a society where X is not the norm is like or can be like. Combine that with humans who like what they know more than what they don't know, and you find communities moving to high entropy / low energy states and staying there.
That said, there isn't anything that prevents people from having standards. Both FreeBSD and MacOS are pretty coherent UNIX type OSes. But it is important to realize that a lot of really innovative and cool stuff comes out of the amazing bubbling pot that is Linux as well. I sometimes wish it were possible to do a better mashup.
> I sometimes wish it were possible to do a better mashup.
I feel the best of both worlds is the bazaar model combined with curated software/library repositories where rules for inclusion are more rigid and opinionated. For example, most programming languages have a standard library (the cathedral) and an ecosystem of third party libraries (the bazaar). Within that ecosystem of third party libraries, we could theoretically have curated repositories of libraries which share a coherent vision. In the real world though, I haven't really seen that happening. Node.js has registry.npmjs.org (no curation), Ruby has rubygems.org (no curation), etc. In the OS world, there is Ubuntu which is more cathedral like but I feel it should be a lot more opinionated perhaps at the cost of flexibility/portability.
People don't use 'Linux', they use a particular Linux Distro which does tend to provide the standardisation described (more so for some, less for others).
The fact that Linux-in-general is a roiling maelstrom is irrelevant to a user using a particular distro. It is relevant to developers and/or packagers though.
In theory, this isn't a million miles away from what Debian aims at. However there's a social pressure on the various teams to include as much as possible, so what curation there is doesn't end up being very opinionated. I personally have some fairly strong opinions on what Debian/Ruby should look like, but have neither the standing nor the time to expend developing it in order to move the needle there.
That said, there isn't anything that prevents people from having standards. Both FreeBSD and MacOS are pretty coherent UNIX type OSes. But it is important to realize that a lot of really innovative and cool stuff comes out of the amazing bubbling pot that is Linux as well. I sometimes wish it were possible to do a better mashup.