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Cursor is not really anything that I feel a need to customize. It’s a pointer that changes shape according to context, and the default implementations usually do it at least decently.

TIL Winamp was still active as a project

Alpine for example uses musl, and Gentoo offers it as an option.
I don’t completely understand the benefits, my own programming experience is several layers away from inner workings of an OS, but at least some distros claim there is space for improvement.

The role of a distribution is to curate packages - select the right combination of versions and verify if it works together. Providing package repositories is also a big one, imagine if you had to compile everything on your machine yourself on every update (khm gentoo khm).

Other than that there isn’t really a lot of space for innovation. After you have a kernel, some base packages, package manager, and maybe a DE, you can install everything else yourself.
The main point of differentiation these days in on the package management side - do you want a rolling release, or a more conservative approach.

There is one point of innovation left, but it highly technical and somewhat risky for everyday users - libc alternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can’t really be replaced by the user.

And then it gives you the most generic answer how to run a docker build, that doesn’t actually address the problem

Specifically for a job of Linix sysadmin, probably yes. If you can afford it do a certification, it will help you stand among other candidates with no work experience.

For other IT jobs it’s not so relevant. Linux is technically on the servers but the infrastructure is hidden from you by multiple levels of abstraction.

yes

There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time

It’s not something that you can really experience directly as the end user. It’s a base on which other features can be built. Most obvious would be fractional scaling.