Most databases persist data to disk, but the underlying files are usually opaque: binary blobs, internal formats, encrypted pages. You cannot just open a file, edit a few lines, and expect the database state to change.
But using the filesystem itself as the source of truth can be surprisingly powerful.
For my personal blog, I use Hugo. Articles are just Markdown files in a Git repository. In a way, that already behaves like a tiny database: posts have authors, tags, metadata, version history, collaboration via Git.
It is simple and ergonomic.
But once the number of files grows, searching, indexing, querying, and connecting data becomes painful. Filesystems are not databases.
So the obvious question is:
What if the filesystem was backed by a real database?