The concern for code duplication is valid, but as the article mentioned it is also a while off until the Nova project is mainlined. I honestly never thought of how the work to bring in Rust to mainline may in effect lead to a more complete deprecation of older hardware as we start to change API’s older/unmaintained components aren’t updated. On the flip side, trimming out older stuff might save maintainer work going forward.

Rust’s cargo is great, I’d say it would be best to make the switch sooner rather than later once your code base is established. The build system and tooling alone is a great reason to switch

It sounds like git-annex to me (doesn’t have to be 3rd party hosts, you can combine your own systems) where it allows decentralized file management across all your devices. I’d also be curious to see how they handle offline backup/file tracking and the sneakernet use cases (something git-annex supports). As it sounds like it is a true filesystem, it could be a nice upgrade assuming feature parity (one gotcha with git-annex, is since it is using git, you can’t easily have other git repositories inside of it).