[jacknews]

This doesn't sound horrible at all, in fact tree filesystems look like an anachronism from when disk space was limited, and both the logical layer of naming and metadata of objects, and the management of the data on storage, were conflated into a single data structure.

A DB to contain all the metadata, and blobs or object storage for the content itself (perhaps with backup metadata). The database manages the namespace, object storage manages the storage layer.

You can easily and quickly search file metadata etc, there could be multiple copies of the content, perhaps distributed, etc, etc.