I've been expecting the unikernel approach to catch on more too - although not the "no OS" it can be pretty stripped down compared to a regular OS. Now that unikernels are starting to gain more traction in the DOD I expect this will continue.
I've worked with Unikernels for a couple of years. They are great, but they are very, very pure and this can be limiting.
Say I have an web API written in Go. For some reason I need to do some openssl stuff before I start up my main program. In a container I can just wrap my program in a little shell script which generates/signs a cert before starting the API.
Such a simple task. It is gonna be a lot harder with a Go Unikernel as I could have to bake this functionality into the application itself.
This Swiss Army knife that is Unix often has it's uses.
I get that, but I rarely need to do stuff like this - I generally use the awesome ACME library to handle certs. But yes, if I did need to do that then a Unikernel wouldn't be useful.
But the reduction in attack surface of not having all those Swiss Army blades hanging about - and not having to configure them just right so I don't accidentally damage stuff - is a real benefit.
You can have best of both worlds with container OSes like Bottlerocket.
In any case, in you have a web API written in Java then you can connect advanced monitoring tools like JDK Flight Recorder and directly affect the system via JMX beans.
So it is more a matter of tooling maturity than anything else.
