Fuchsia is to Google as Tizen is to Samsung... something keep in the back pocket for a worst-case legal total war, but unlikely to see any real world use.
It's a bit cynical but I think they might even want to just bin linux as a base for Android and migrate off of it completely, get their notebooks/chromebooks on Fuchsia, and make a play for OSes to run on. Think of how much data they could get for the industrial advertising complex at the OS level.
That's what everyone wants to do. Guess what, Google might be big, but Android is big because Google has many partners.
If they try to pull that off, all their partners will drop them like a hot potato.
And I agree with you it's probably to ditch Linux cause Linux has too much political baggage, i.e. they want to fully control Fuchsia.
For us, it's probably better if Fuchsia fails.
At that point, will they have a choice? I mean most partners already bow to Google's control over AOSP -- if they said tomorrow that android was actually switching to run on top of fuchsia (let's say they did all the work to make it happen, so it was "seamless"), everyone would just be like... "ok".
While I'm not sure I necessarily want Fuchsia to fail, I'm 100% with you on it being likely better for the world if google didn't own everything...
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/an-update-...