Systems software research is alive and well. Making new single machine kernels is just no longer priority. Community shifted to distributed system (essentially viewing thousands of computers as one fault-tolerant OS). A lot of things came indeed from academia. The next shift currently underway is in distributed machine learning (how can you build, train and serve trillion trillion parameter models - call it a distributed machine learning OS). A lot of things again is coming from academia. The field has grown up and old folks are lost in nostalgia of not seeing new kernels as they used to.