I think this is a pretty dangerous attitude, and it is really the only thing wrong with Linux, and probably leads to replacement of simple structure and functionality with a complex software suite that is merely more convenient, like systemd. "Let's change this thing because we want to, because it will improve performance 0.0024%"
Feature creep is what happens when restraint was not exercised.
IMO, since it really doesn't matter what the filesystem looks like, leave it be for standards and compatibility. Seriously, it takes, idk, maybe, a lack of humility to want to change fundamental characteristics of UNIX when the reasons for doing so are a little capricious.
I'm not really talking about the parent, fwiw. I'm talking about the crowd and ochlocracy.
There's plenty greybeards that for them "Linux" is a full screen terminal running emacs on decade-old hardware. "I don't use antialiased fonts, why the hell should I care about decent HiDPI support?" And then protest every time some working group tries to modernise and improve the Linux desktop. You see them every time on this forum.
I'm a greybeard, I've used Linux full time on the desktop for 20 years. I don't get this conservative, "we don't need it" attitude.
It's a historical quirk on linux, where there is no clear separation between "base OS packages" and "3rd party packages".
On FreeBSD the split is very real, anything in /bin/ ships with my OS and is maintained and updated by the FreeBSD team. Anything in /usr/bin/ comes from ports and is thus a 3rd party package I installed and can be safely nuked and I need to maintain/update it.
All the files that might be expected by others to be in certain standard locations are sym-linked to those locations, e.g. the executables to /usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/bin or /sbin, in order to appear in PATH.
In this case you no longer need any kind of database to know which files may be safely nuked to delete any package.
Moreover, in FreeBSD there is no such separation between the "base OS packages" and "3rd party packages", implemented as a difference between root and /usr. You might have misremembered /usr/local, which is indeed a place for "3rd party packages" in all UNIX-derived operating systems.
There are many "base OS packages" that are installed in /usr/bin or in /usr/sbin.
In any FreeBSD system, you can see their source files in /usr/src/usr.bin and in /usr/src/usr.sbin.
I have been using FreeBSD for a quarter of century, since FreeBSD 2.0, and there has never been such a separation between root and /usr.
The separation between /bin and /usr/bin and the other similar pairs was made only to allow /usr to be unmounted, when it is on another device than the root device, but still have in the root file system the minimal set of tools needed for diagnosing and repairing any broken file system or network connection.
In ancient FreeBSD installations it was always recommended to have a separate small root partition, e.g. of a few hundred megabytes, and some large partitions for usr and var.
This original use has become completely obsolete, because now, for diagnosing and repairing problems, it is preferable to boot from an USB stick or from the network (using a ramdisk as root file system), and then run diagnostics or repair programs without touching even the root file system unless modifying it is intentional.
In FreBSD it might still be possible to put /usr on a different partition or device and then unmount /usr, but in many Linux distributions this traditional usage is broken, because some of the programs installed in the root directories need components installed in /usr, so when /usr is unmounted they stop working.