> Aside from that having been historically true, back when hardware was MUCH simpler, why should that be a particularly important distinction today?
because kernel developers care about backwards and forwards compatibility, userspace developers tend not to.
As an example of where 'put it in userspace' is an ongoing disaster, look at camera 'drivers' for android devices. This is done in userspace, but there are a lot of not-so-old android devices that cannot use the camera on newer versions because the closed source userspace drivers don't work with newer versions of android.