That was the vision of OOP, too ("Software ICs") and we all know how well that turned out. Even Unix is not really the big success story here -- one might say that even something like 'awk' is already stretching the paradigm, never mind common fellow travelers like Perl or Emacs. Never mind most graphical interfaces.
I know, this will probably evoke a "No true Unixman" response, maybe even with pointers towards the Plan 9 highlands, but the truth is that a) connecting stuff is hard and b) a good connection is often a prime feature itself.
Especially the latter will result into a plethora of modules of its own, for nearly all possible combinations of component modules. The end result is even more "frameworks". Sure, they're going to be modular frameworks, but I don't really know whether that's going to help the developers who live in the uncanny valley of mostly knowing what's there and how it connects.
A "fat kernel" with lots of "satellite modules" might be a viable approach, too. Just like with most programming languages (i.e. not C or JavaScript), where you've got plenty of useful stuff in your standard library, and some package manager for the rest.
But hey, if the JavaScript ninjas finally figure out how to properly combine software components, that would be better for all of us. I just wouldn't bet on that.
For past 4 years, there is NPM, and there is people trying to explain why you should build your software with modules instead of frameworks.