This is very interesting as this is almost identical to how the Haiku Operating System does package management using their own packaging format (hpkg) which uses packagefs. [0] [1]
This format is used more than just to package applications, but to update the whole OS in a consistent manner [2] as it is also versioned in with shared-libraries and this was implemented in 2013.
I learnt about the Haiku package management system when I had already developed distri for several months.
I think it’s very telling that the two approaches look so similar, so I was really happy to learn about the similarities with Haiku!