One has to be in quite a techie bubble to equate Linux kernel features with actual world-changing events, as the author goes on to do.
More on-topic though, having read the rest of the article, my guess is that while these features will let companies squeeze some more efficiency out of high-end servers, they won't change how most of us develop applications.
You'll still need a few worker threads for blocking syscalls that haven't been ported to io_uring yet but that need is greatly reduced compared to the previous state of things.
So even if you're not using io_uring yourself the language standard libraries or server frameworks will.
There are WIPs for netty, libuv, nginx. Other projects are exploring it or have announced intent to use it.
I'm also really excited by how you can use io_uring to power everything (fs, networking etc.) with one easy api and a single-threaded event loop: https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/tree/master/demos/io_u...
io_uring makes thread-per-core designs so much easier.
It's not a tech bubble as much as it's a journo bubble. People are reading before they're writing, so he's seeing trendy topics like 2020 and the virus. He feels he needs a hook to get his readers engaged, so he's reaching for things readers can related to.
It's a bad hook. I think an editor would have cut that whole intro.
Most applications will not change the way they work with the kernel, because they don't work with it, they hide it as well as possible under libraries and frameworks. Even so, most applications need neither io_uring, nor eBPF. Hardly a revolution.
The intro is both highly visible, and, because of how writing and thinking work, it's also the spot where you're either collecting your thoughts or trying to hook the reader.
If you don't have an editor and you're done with your first draft, try deleting your first few paragraphs. It's often a simple way to vastly improve a piece.
Knowing that with eBPF I simply cannot crash the laptop I'm working on is a huge deal, and reduces the great psychological hurdle that kernel development always had (for me, at least).