Even as far back as XP/Vista Microsoft has wanted to run the file system as more of an adaptive database than a classical hierarchical file system.
The leaked beta for Vista had this included and it ran like absolute shit, mostly because harddrives are slow and ram was at a premium, especially in Vista as it was such a bloated piece or shit.
NTFS has since evolved to include more and more of these "smart" file system components.
Now they want to go full on with this "smart" approach to the filesystem.
It'll still be slow and shit, just like it was 2 decades ago.