We probably would have had BSD wars for real not long after, if it had become popular. To some extent, this is by design, as there's no culture or ethos that pushes people back together.
Seems to me this had nothing to do with licensing or culture, but rather that if you wanted your distribution you'd use the upstream kernel and build your own userland with blackjack and hookers and whatever direction you were interested in, so there's some measure of strong relatedness in the kernel everyone shares. You might add a few modules or patches, but few people bother (or need) to fork the kernel itself.
Since BSDs are systems, if you want to go your own way you fork the entire system (that's literally the genesis of both OpenBSD and Dragonfly).
As far as BSD being a mess after base I completely disagree. Using and understanding a package manager makes life pretty simple.
That said if the Linux community did that they would probably realize how silly containers are :)
You also need to do this for any pipeline for any OS.