I think that part of the reason for my thinking is that I've recently been playing around with USD (Universal Scene Description). It is currently mostly based o

I think that part of the reason for my thinking is that I've recently been playing around with USD (Universal Scene Description). It is currently mostly based on files, but I find the underlying representation - of layers of atomic properties being composed together in a massive tree - to be very elegant, and it can be managed in a database without any files or blobs anywhere. As another example: in the early web, behind every url was a file (with an actual file extension), but then we abstracted them into resources, and I feel that this coincided with an evolution of the field. The concept of a file or blob will probably still be useful in some capacity for decades to come, but I wouldn't want it to hinder us from realizing better abstractions.