Currently it's even more basic. The current usable parts are a pagecache following the llama approach, some great testing utility libraries, and an index (that you can use as a kv) that follows the bwtree approach. Later it will have structured access support, but it needs some more db components to get there. It is a construction kit as well as a kv.

Not really, when the embedded database is allowed to run its own threads and network connections embedding something like etcd makes perfect sense. It removes the failure modes of the client connection and simplifies deployment.