just had to probe gpt a bit more about reiser also, and it went into a lot of depth about the stuff in reiser4 that didn't end up being practical, as well as a last section about what things it did that a typical modern CoW filesystem would benefit from:

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immutable, append only data like nostr events and blossom blobs are extremely relevant to this with regard to the question of efficiently especially large binary data alongside small regular event json data. i'm snipping this to put somewhere for later to maybe find some ways to speed up orly's database even more. i think right now, it's pretty good, and would scale to 3 figure core server rigs with RAID nvme drives pretty well but these optimizations would become more and more important the larger the database gets. so, yeah circling back to the OP, @npub1gcxz...nj5z in fact, your recommendation is probably generally correct for most (newbies to sysops) tasks that nostr relay operators would want to do, without such improvements being applied.