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Yea, sbrk makes sense in a flat address space. I don't think it makes as much sense with virtual memory.

A flat address space is the future. You don't need virtual memory when a flat address space can hold all memory addresses for all processes as it does now with 64-bit processors.

Virtual memory isn't just for giving each process enough space. It's for security reasons, too.

Could you explain how virtual memory makes a process more secure? My intuition is that it would be another source of contention to manage (like CPU, RAM, IO, etc).

Maybe you're considering non-sequential address space an improvement for security. That I could see. ASLR would be another, which, you can see the effect of by multiple runs of t/_end.exe in rt0.

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