I do think there's something to be said for files being seen not as things that can be "owned" and "manipulated" and "locked" by a main process, but rather as their own independent services, in a unified registry, who can only return results asynchronously, and only over an external API - a la the Amazon Memo (https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/). Whether there's an API broker (in this case, the kernel) is just an implementation detail of the "network" layer.