I think I did try stuff like that, including mounting / with nodatacow and other similar options. I walked away with the impression that btrfs was a powerful t

I think I did try stuff like that, including mounting / with nodatacow and other similar options. I walked away with the impression that btrfs was a powerful tool for certain use-cases, but definitely not something I'd call a "general purpose" filesystem given the need to be fairly knowledgeable about its internals to use it for common desktop use-cases. To me a general purpose filesystem is something like ext4, it doesn't have amazing performance, it's not bad either, but generally nothing unexpected happens with it and I can just leave it there and don't have to worry about it. The btrfs filesystem seemed like the opposite of that. A very powerful tool whose power and flexibility made it less general purpose by virtue of needing to keep close tabs on how you were using it.