"It works on my machine" remains a problem to this day.

While you can make various workarounds to rectify this, it still seems like "so make your machine the machine it runs on" is a very effective solution. Unlike the alternatives, once you commit to it, you can't forget or revert back to bad old patterns.

I've had this thought before: What if Amazon, one day, just decreed that all employees' laptops had to run Amazon Linux?

Maybe it's a good thing I'm not Jeff Bezos, but I think it would have a lot of positive effects.