I'll take Buildroot, and Bitbake first (Yocto itself is slight different we'll get to that later). Both Buildroot, Bitbake share the ultimate goal with all these news systems like linuxkit and bottle rocket. They all aim at producing single-image, pruprose built linux distros based on the very same usual suspects of upstream components. So the question really two-fold: out-of-the box availability of said upstream components (this is where we should stop talking about Bitbake and talk about Yocto -- Buildroot kind of commingles the two) AND the usability of the build harness itself.
So on #1, if you look very casually at Buildroot and Yocto -- they will clearly come on top over this next generation of systems. It appears they have WAY more upstream components already available for you to chose from. Compared to them the list here looks almost laughable https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/tree/develop... and https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/pkg The problem though is combinatoric explosion of how you can compose all these upstream components. The canonical example here is the choice of your init system. You pick one -- and your choice in everything else gets severely restricted. So to some extent that apparent embarrassment of riches that Buildroot and Yocto offer is misleading.
These next generation systems, on the other hand, don't pretend that you can build a host OS in any shape or form you want (hence very few base packages) but rather that you build "just enough of Linux to run containerd" -- the rest of what you would typically put into your baseOS goes into various containers. This is a very different approach to constructing the bootable system, but subtly so -- which I don't think a lot of people on either side of this debate appreciate.
I honestly think that what makes Yocto and Buildroot difficult is that they want to be all things to all people and they want it at the level of baseOS -- complexity-wise, this is a wrong approach these days.
That scores one point for these next generation systems in my book.
The question #2 is not even a comparison. In Buildroot most of the integration/package logic is implemented in Makefiles and usability-wise (if you're trying to actively change the system or add a new package) it falls apart pretty quickly (it is still great if you're just using what's already there btw). In Bitbake -- the codebases is REALLY complex Python which suffers from the same issue. Contrast it with Linuxkit/Project EVE where all that logic is golang and bottle rocket which uses Rust and ask yourself whether you would rather debug a complex issue with a dozen of Makefiles all full of non-trivial recipes or look over go/rust codebase (yes, I know all these things are turing complete and thus equivalent -- but life is to short to debug Makefile).
If you don't quite believe me, there's been a number of studies about using Buildroot and Yocto for building containers. Pretty much all of them came back with the same conclusion -- the usability aspect of extending them makes it a non-starter. Here's the one from the last Kubecon that VMWare guys did: https://blogs.vmware.com/opensource/2020/02/27/distribution-...
> These next generation systems, on the other hand, don't pretend that you can build a host OS in any shape or form you want (hence very few base packages) but rather that you build "just enough of Linux to run containerd" -- the rest of what you would typically put into your baseOS goes into various containers. This is a very different approach to constructing the bootable system, but subtly so -- which I don't think a lot of people on either side of this debate appreciate.
This is a valid approach if you want to build something that can only run containers, but IMO is somewhat orthogonal to the Yocto and Buildroot goal of building distros for embedded platforms.
It's awesome that people are making new tools to do similar things to Yocto and Buildroot in this post-container world, but I don't think it's really fair to say that bottlerocket is a direct competitor to Yocto/Buildroot. It's probably fairer to say that bottlerocket makes it easier to do things that Yocto/Buildroot aren't really designed to do. Hopefully both live on, serving their own niche! I'm all for specialised tools rather than generic 'do it all' tools.
Can you say more about the advantages over Buildroot and Yocto?