Is Hadoop dead? More precisely — it has been demoted from the default. The HDFS plus YARN plus MapReduce trio is no longer how anyone starts a new analytics platform. Spark replaced MapReduce, object storage replaced HDFS, open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi) ended the Hive metastore era. This post traces the whole journey — what replaced what, where Hadoop still lives in 2026, and …