Adapting to advancing hardware isn't impossible. It's been awhile since I've looked so details are a little hazy, but I know the Mill architecture had an answer to this. I believe they were using effectively two-pass compilation. The first compiled against an abstract version of the architecture, and this is what was distributed. Then this could be further specialized on the user's machine as at that point the limits of the hardware would be known.

I don't recall if they had an idea for SMT as well or not. It's possible they wrote it off entirely, particularly after Spectre and all that.