Apache Arrow and Substrait have been working towards making this a reality.
I see a future where executing a query can/will send plans to many different engines distributed across the cloud, but also locally on your on machine.
It open up another market too: compatible, scalable storage. Sell shovels in a gold-rush, and what better shovel than the substrate infrastructure that those bidding query engines would probably depend on.
The business model of selling a commodity is wildly unlike the business model tech is in today.
When there’s a common intermediate representation you can pass around those compute instructions and execute. And when there’s shared memory formats data can pass from storage to engine without serialization/deserialization.
So it wouldn’t matter if data is here or there, in this or that format, because the instructions are the same the specific interface (snowflake, MySQL, a local parquet file, etc) is irrelevant mitigating the need for glue code.