alt Hacker NewsI see a number of assumptions in your post which I find not matching my view of the picture.
Containers arose as a way to solve the dependency problems created by traditional Unix. They grow from tools like chroot, BSD jails, and Solaris Zones. Containers allow to deploy dependencies that cannot be simultaneously installed on a traditional Unix host system. it's not a UNIX architecture limitation but rather a result of POSIX + tradition; e.g. Nix also solves this, but differently.
Containers (like chroot and jail before them) also help ensure that a running service does not depend on the parts of the filesystem it wasn't given access to. Additionally, containers can limit network access, and process tree access.
These limitations are not a proper security boundary, but definitely a dependency boundary, helping avoid spaghetti-style dependencies, and surprises like "we never realized that our ${X} depends on ${Y}".
Then, there's the Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering [1], which states: "We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection." So yes, expect the number of levels of indirection to grow everywhere in the stack. A wise engineer can expect to merge or remove a some levels here and there, when the need for them is gone, but they would never expect that new levels of indirection should stop emerging.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
To be honest, I've read your response 3 times and I still don't see where we disagree, assuming that we do.
I've mostly focused on the worst Docker horrors I've seen in production, extrapolating that to the future of containers, as pulling in new "containerized" dependencies will inevitably become just as effortless as it currently is with regular dependencies in the new-style high-level programming languages. You've primarily described a relatively fresh, or a well-managed Docker deployment, while admitting that spaghetti-style dependencies have become a norm and new layers will pile up (and by extension, make things hard to manage).
I think our points of view don't actually collide.