I was a Minix fan before Linux, and Linus studied Minix to write Linux. I thought a microkernel was better than a monolithic kernel for security, reliability, portability, and simplicity reasons. But then again, Betamax was the better videotape format and VHS one out, so the best tech doesn't always win. I remember the heated exchanges between Linus and Andy back in the day. Funny someone commented above about Minix being antiquated from the 80s, and Andy had posted that Linux was technology from the 70s due to it choosing a monolithic kernel and being tied to x86 processors. I had MachTen, a BSD, Unix-like microkernel, running on my PowerMac in the early 90s.
Ironically, Minix runs Linux on Intel CPUs, and the Linux kernel jungling containers on top of an hypervisor, with DPKG, FUSE,... looks like a fat microkernel.
On the cloud workloads, with kubernetes on top of hypervisors, the workload is more akin to microservers than anything else.
Likewise on Android, since Project Treble and starting with Android 8, all newer drivers are userspace processes with Android IPC.
