I think youre being uncharitable to the Unix way. the Unix way is more about having a data standard that all programs can use, rather than a front end that does

I think youre being uncharitable to the Unix way. the Unix way is more about having a data standard that all programs can use, rather than a front end that does everything. yes the everything as a stream of text model didn't really scale, but I don't think that disproves the concept. all of your examples could work as well as, if not better if you standardised a data format and/ or protocol. The current landscape for software isn't really that monolithic. software of any size implements plugins. If you look back to monolithic software of the 80s where there wasn't any expandability, wasn't things like tool kits or shared libraries. In a sense 'small software' didn't lose. it just moved up and down the stack a bit, and arguably still lives on quite successfully on mobile phones.