A distributed file system seems like way more work to set up. Also not everything has to follow the Unix philosophy. Plenty of very useful things are better of

A distributed file system seems like way more work to set up. Also not everything has to follow the Unix philosophy. Plenty of very useful things are better off less Unix-y eg ffmpeg. But this doesn’t seem to do a bad job - it’s a very dedicated tool to do one thing, it just doesn’t store everything as files.