Yes, we need a newer web browser, but that could run on old-school Linux/Unix just fine. Aside from that, there isn't anything wrong with nineties Linux which couldn't have been brought up to modern standards with a bit more discipline.
Someone decided ALSA (or OSS, it doesn't matter) was rough to deal with, so they build Pulse and JACK on top of it, rather than a modest expansion of ALSA. Someone didn't like the network layer, so they build a userspace wrapper, and someone didn't like that, so they wrapped it up in a GUI.
At the end of the day:
1) Everything is slow, requiring literally more than 100x the resources it once did.
2) Everything is complex, with layers upon layers, and text files with comments "This is managed by my hack. DO NOT EDIT THIS BY HAND. I keep the exact same data elsewhere, in my own config file, since I couldn't be bothered to read what's in the line below."
3) Everything is brittle and hard-to-understand. I knew how nineties Linux booted. Today, the logic is distributed among dozens of layers, mostly because people wanted to reinvent new things, rather than polishing/improving/fixing old ones. Different apps go for the wrong layer, and tutorials point to the wrong ones too.
Now Ubuntu is throwing its hands up at the mess, and building snap to hide all this under yet. another. layer.
As a footnote, ALSA was just about the last time this happened right, with it replacing OSS while maintaining compatibility.