Alternatively, it requires cloud providers and such losing business if they refuse to support the latest features.

The "surface area" argument against io_uring can apply to literally any innovation. Over on LWN, there's an article on path traversal difficulties that mentions people how, because openat2(2) is often banned as inconvenient to whitelist using seccomp, eople have to work around path traversal bugs using fiddly, manual, and slow element-by-element path traversal in user space.

Ridiculous security theater. A new system call had a vulnerability in 2010 and so we're never able to take practical advantage of new kernel features ever?

(It doesn't help that gvisor refuses to acknowledge the modern world.)

Great example of descending into a shitty equilibrium because the great costs of a bad policy are diffuse but the slight benefits are concentrated.

The only effective lever is commercial pressure. All the formal methods in the world won't help when the incentive structure reinforces technical obstinacy.