From my personal, outsider, view the ‘Distribution’ thing is a major bottleneck with the long term stability of Linux. Distributions dilute the focus on maintenence by dividing the available labour resource over a foolish duplication of tasks. This is usually a marketing thing of some kind (ie: Oracle Redhat fork, Ubuntu vs. Debian, Slack vs. Gentoo, CentOS vs. Redhat).
That point has been used for 25 years against Linux and 40+ against UNIX. The worldwide dominance of UNIX and Linux says otherwise, as you mention in your later reply. I'm surprised that with such a long history of being nearly equivalent to "the sky is falling" it keeps being a point of contention.