For example, imagine a world in which Linux had a RLIMIT_CUMULATIVE_IO:
"How else am I supposed to prevent programs wearing out my flash? Of course we should have this limit"
"Of course a program should get SIGIO after doing too much IO. It'll encourage use of compression"
"This is a security feature, dumbass. Crypto-encrypters need to write encrypted files, right? If you limit a program to writing 100MB, it can't do that much damage"
Yet we don't have a cumulative write(2) limit and the world keeps spinning. It's the same way with the limits we do have --- file number limits, vm.max_map_count, VSIZE, and so on. They're relicts of a different time, yet the I Like Limits people will retroactively justify their existence and resist attempts to make them more suitable for the modern world.