Container orchestration is light years better than anything that we were doing on the operations side before. This is why I find it extremely hard to believe we are going back. We would need something much better to jump to and that has not been invented yet. So, Orchestration/Docker/Containers are here to stay for the foreseeable future.
The rkt image format tried early on to subvert the Docker Image format and was unsuccessful. Today, there is much more depending on the existing image standard. You would totally fragment the existing integrations if you attempted to change. I am not saying that people will not try. But, I just cannot see it happening anytime soon. You have all these Clouds betting on it, you have millions of Dockerfiles out there now, and tons of people trained on it. All these CI/CD platforms supporting it. You would need some massive reason to change. Why would they? You might see people under the hood take the Docker Image and wrap it somehow, like gvisor [5], but they will still likely accept the Docker Image.
Go look at these charts from Datadog about their customers Docker adoption [6]. Every single chart is hockey stick growth. This is a sampling of 10,000 companies running 700 million containers in real-world use. I am just offering a counter to the point that the image format is coming to its death. I do not see that.
Disclosure: Former Docker employee.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
[3] https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/
[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/