Nice post.

I also like Jacques comment about a cognitive revolution. The invention of the press also led to a cognitive revolution. It took a long time but linear thinking became predominant.
Here the word "Predominant" is important. I am not sure if what we are seeing is a cognitive revolution. It might just be linear/sequential thinking losing grounds.

It is not the written word that created the linear man but the book itself. Physically it is hard to write an efficient book that is not linear.
Some might remember programmed instruction books that use to suggest different pages depending on what answer you gave.
The book became a predominant medium and linearity then became predominant. Enthalpy/Enthropy principles at work.

The new predominant medium is non linear. It stills uses words but it is now more economical to use a non linear use of words.
It is not by accident that our new form of presenting words actually ressembles the underlying medium. Engineers should recognize this as
impedance matching.

It doesn't take much to tip the balance of dominance. Darwin would agree with this one. Small advantages repeated millions of times are usually sufficient.

It is now often more economical to create non-linear courses than it is to create linear ones.
This puts a lot of pressure on the traditional curriculum model. So I would say the traditional curriculum is not dead. However it will slowly become less common.

Gilbert