There will be a continum of technologies, not a single answer.
I suspect there will be continuing need for both VMs and containers. Each has its pros and cons in different areas of application.
There is also what I would consider a third category, which is whatever things like Snap packages would be. They also incorporate an application's dependencies into a single bundle which is managed and updated as a package, and which offers some degree of isolation from the rest of the system. On the negative side they tend to be noticably slower to start up than native packages because they carry their own dependencies inside them.
So there would seem to be a continuum of native packages (e.g. debs), Snaps, containers, and VMs, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Most people dealing with IT systems are going to need to understand all of them, because the world is getting more complicated, not simpler.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
