Or Burroughs, Xerox PARC mainframes, IBM mainframes language environments, UCSD Pascal, Lilith, Ceres, Inferno, Windows Phone 7, Windows Store, MicroEJ, watchOS bitcode,....
I think that the use of such systems has only increased, thanks to mainstream adoption of IoT devices and cloud environments.
OEMs can change their hardware at will while supporting existing applications, and cloud environments can be heterogeneous, without much issues moving applications around.
Not just mainframes either, AS/400 (for minicomputer-class machines, as opposed to mainframes) is the same way. A binary, hardware-independent VM is the officially-supported programming environment.