What?? I've used Linux for quite a while, and I've had a very good experience with software. I struggle to follow what they're talking about, Linux works just fine. Using Windows software is also pretty easy and like many people have already mentioned wine-binfmt is basically what this article is describing.
A change in security model from the 1970s/1980s might help with security and isolation. However that same security would also generally be a pain without really smooth management in the desktop environment / shell.
Sure I believe backwards compatibility is a nice to have feature, but I have never, nor do I think I will ever, have a need to run 20-year-old software.
20-year-old exe files can fail on both Windows and WINE if they touch something relatively obscure. It's easier to throw files at the problem under WINE though (you can just throw away the prefix if you break something). The single biggest mistake WINE makes is defaulting to a single shared prefix (and the second sin is similar - trying to integrate folders and menus naively).
20-year-old dynamic binaries on Linux can almost always work today; snapshot.debian.org has all the old libraries you'll ever need. The potential exception is if they touch something hardware-ish or that needs exclusive access, but this is still better than the situation on Windows.
20-year-old static binaries on Linux will fail surprisingly often, since there have been changes in filesystem and file layout.
Yes there are modern ports, and newer versions, but these kind of retro games, and utilities, are used by many.
Good luck with the hellscape you're building.
So open/close, I do not care as long as it does what I need, how I need.
And I feel I am not the only one thinking like this.
Its like expecting people who only eat food to understand how its made.. You're just not the target.
How many missiles do you know that run Windows?
I do it all the time. Works fine. Do you have a specific example or is this just a hastily constructed strawman?