Ask HN: Modern Advances in Systems Software?

Lately I have seen many programming languages, targeting systems programming. But as far as systems software go, I do not see as much design and development, as I heard there were in the 90s. Docker and BarrelFish OS (www.barrelfish.org) are some of the steps I would classify as the steps into the direction of underlying infrastructure design. But that's it. Are there less programmers working today on the core systems than during the 80s and 90s?