But couldn't containers have been designed that way? One thing I have in mind is one of windows 10 recent features, which consist in running certain applications using the same hardware level memory protection mechanism than VMs, so that the application is safe from the OS/Kernel, and the OS/Kernel is safe from the application (can't find the exact name for this new feature unfortunately).
Containers can't be designed that way as long as the primitives to build them that way (which are mostly part of the Linux kernel) are missing. That's a core part of the article. Containers aren't an entity by themselves, they're a clever and useful combination of an existing set of capabilities.