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Let's take a look at Ynnari Faction. It is the "official GW sponsored" soup recipe of the 40k. Once you mix these ingredients in, you can choose to give it a different faction name and claim different sets of chapter rules.

What if this became the norm for soups? Rather than allowing players to cherry pick the best units and assign best CT's to them and call it a soup, you actually provide the correct "recipes" for making a soup. Currently, 40k soups aren't actually soups but actually a healthy bowl of salad (the U.S. and its melting pot vs. mixing bowl analogy). You have your choice of leafy veggies for your base (the cheap screens), choice of protein (the super heavy), choice of add-ons (the stratagems, CT, traits), and your salad dressing (the flavor of the month i.e. smash captains).

Say, we introduce a sub-codex called "The Cohorts of Imperium", and it draws units from Imperial Knights, Astra Militarum, and [insert w.e. faction]. The Cohorts of Imperium will have its own CT, Stratagems, & traits.

This would mean that the standard "salad" recipe needs to be revisited where you have to decide your "main" faction whose CT, stratagems & traits you have access to, and not all 3.

I mean I'm alright with having a broad sweeping "Imperium" chapter tactic provided that everything gets something out of the trait.

I'm not entirely sure I followed the extended metaphor. As you're comparing your suggestion to the ynnari, I assume you mean something like...

* Take a special character in a detachment
* That detachment loses its normal chapter tactics, stratagems, psychic powers, and special characters and instead gains a weaker chapter tactic, set of strats, and psychic powers?

You'd have to design these Cohorts of the Imperium benefits such that they're weak enough to not become unintentionally good with any of the many imperial factions. The ynnari rules walk that fine line where they're useful enough for each aeldari faction to get *some* use out of them, but not so useful as to be an auto-take. Even the killiest ynnari melee units are either mediocre enough in melee or expensive enough to keep a melee bonus from being an auto-take. The imperium has a lot more unit variety, so you'd have to be careful.

Giving the imperium +1 to hit in melee if you killed something previously in the turn, for instance, could actually be quite efficient on a horde of cheap guardsmen or a squad of ogryn or even some kitted up melee marines.

In a weird way, the non-vanilla marine books kind of already do this. Blood Angels and Space Wolves, for instance, prevent you from fielding Calgar or Vulkan in their detachment (if you want to keep your rules), swap out your psychic powers, swap out your strats, and give you a unique chapter tactic.

Or are you basically just suggesting that only one of your detachments can unlock strats and chapter tactics?