I wonder if it can be traced back to something RedHat did somewhere, because it may have all begun once you COULDN'T be absolutely certain that anything even remotely "enterprise" was running on a RedHat.
I think it's a natural outgrowth of what Linux is.
Linux is just a kernel - you need to ship your own userland with it. Therefore, early distros had to assemble an entire OS around this newfangled kernel from bits and pieces, and those bits and pieces needed a way to be installed and removed at will. Eventually this installation mechanism gets scope creep and and suddenly things like FreeCiv and XBill are distributed using the same underlying system that bash and cron use.
This system of distro packaging might be good as a selling point for a distro - so people can brag about their distro comes with 10,000 packages or whatever. That said, I can think of no other operating system out there where the happiest path of releasing software is to simply release a tarball of the source, hope a distro maintainer packages it for you, hope they do it properly, and hope that nobody runs into a bug due to a newer or older version of a dependency you didn't test against.
Yours is a philosophy I encounter more and more. Where there should be that unified platform, ideally fast moving, where software is only tested against $latest. Stability is a thing of the past. The important thing is more feature.
Instead of designing a solution and perfecting it overtime, it's endless tweaking where there's a new redesign every years. And you're supposed to use the exact computer as the Dev to get their code to work.
Red Hat was actually doing something more directly based on a variety of existing Linux projects than Docker but switched to OCI/Docker when that came about--rather than jumping on the CloudFoundry bandwagon. (Which many argues was obviously the future for container orchestration.)
Kubernetes was also not the obvious winner in its time with Mesos in particular seeming like a possible alternative when it wasn't clear if orchestration and resource management weren't possibly different product categories.
I was at Red Hat at the time and my impression was they did a pretty good job of jumping onto where the community momentum at the time was--while doubtless influencing that momentum at the time.
