I think quite a few of the hyperbolic comments here haven't seen any of this video and are just reacting to the title.
From what I can gather from watching this so far is, it just sounds like a layer you can optionally choose to use on-top of sockets that manages things like: TLS, multiple networks (4G/3G/Wi-Fi), DNS resolving, proxies, etc for you so you don't need to write it all yourself from scratch every time.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, or maybe none of this is actually as hard as it sounds in practice. But this seems like it might be atleast some what useful.
> I think quite a few of the hyperbolic comments
That's what you get from things like deprecating OpenGL and replacing it with a non-multiplatform alternative: bad reputation. They should ask Microsoft if it's easy to get rid of if once you have it.
I'm not a graphics programmer, but everything I've read about OpenGL tells me moving to Metal isn't some embrace/extend maneuver but more likely due to the fact OpenGL is steaming ancient garbage. Kind of like the types who once complained that MacOS wasn't built on X Window (chortle)
BSD sockets isn't a bastion of extensible interface design, it basically amounts to one giant ioctl() in every operating system. Darwin has weird escape hatches built into it (AF_SYSTEM) much like Linux netlink, and protocol parameter documentation is strewn across 5+ man pages each documenting a different set of magic value combinations for non-portably controlling some part of the stack. TCP_USER_TIMEOUT? That's one of many, many Linux socket options, but it's part of our precious so-portable socket interface we must maintain forever!
OS X chooses to bury its system call interface too, it's always been considered a private detail of the C library. I see no reason why socket() and friends couldn't similarly be forgotten. If some clean 21st century redesign of an ancient API has knock-on effects for the structure of code in open source projects across the ecosystem, that's probably a good thing in the long run. Progress never happens by hugging the past, especially when that past is ugly and filled with horrors
Try not to look at this as "hey, MacOS is breaking precious UNIX", but more as "hey look, why can't Bonjour+multipath TCP be a one liner on Linux too?"
I've held the title of graphics programmer professionally a few times and I do think it was a bad idea. If you're targeting Android/Linux/Windows/OSX it's really handy to be able to run the same APIs on the desktop for debugging and faster iteration time.
The real knife in the back was when they forked for Metal instead of adopting Vulkan. I've not used Vulkan in anger yet(just a couple toy demos) but everything I saw pointed to it solving all the major issues people have with OpenGL. Now there's another N+1 APIs, shader language and graphics pipeline that you need to support if you're building a graphical application and not leveraging Unity/UE4/etc.