You can usually disable atime if you have performance concerns, so it's not really that big of a deal. I'd say a clear failure of the unix legacy is that file

You can usually disable atime if you have performance concerns, so it's not really that big of a deal. I'd say a clear failure of the unix legacy is that file creation time wasn't tracked. You only had atime, ctime, and mtime. On macOS you can only access st_birthtimespec with stat(2) if the `_DARWIN_FEATURE_64_BIT_INODE` macro is defined. A quick search shows most newer filesystems support birth or creation time: * Btrfs: otime * ext4: crtime * UFS2: st_birthtime * ZFS: crtime