There were older attempts at this stuff, in the 90s with "Beowulf" clusters that had cross-machine process management and whatnot. It's a lot harder than it seems to make this approach make sense in the real world, as the abstraction hides important operational details. The explicit container + orchestration abstraction is probably closer to the ideal than trying to stretch linux/systemd/cgroups across the network "seamlessly". It's clearer what's going on and what the operational trade-offs are.