[hnav]

my point was that if a hardware vendor were to approach this problem, they'd probably have 2 (prev,next) partitions that they write firmware to, plus separate mounts for config and logs, rather than a kitchen-sink CoW FS

[ssl-3]

What aspect of ZFS prevents the kind of layout that you envision, do you suppose?

ZFS works just fine with partitions, if that's how a person/company/org wants to use it today.