* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18969290
The hoo-ha over tar and cpio in the 1980s when the subject of standardization came up, and the whole raison d'être of pax, is largely forgotten nowadays. But the problems that were brought to light back then live on.
The thing to bear in mind is that we already have attempts to improve upon this. The problematic formats in the 1980s were themselves products of the second-system effect, adding on various things to the original tape archive format. We are now, in the second decade of the 21st century, well into umpteenth-system effect.
This brings up a point where this article is very wrong. The pax utility did not appear in 2001. pax was in the POSIX draft back in the early 1990s, and had become widespread enough to be in reference books by 1991. The article conflates the PAX extensions with the pax utility. This, and the incorrect dates, are errors promulgated by Wikipedia, which I challenged back in 2018 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pax_(Unix)#Incomplete_Inf... and which was probably the source of these errors in the article. Always double-check what Wikipedia says on computing topics with a proper reference.
Before being tempted to reinvent the wheel here, I recommend a look at all of the times during the so-called "archiver wars" where this wheel already was reinvented, and learning from them. Of particular note, given this article, is Rahul Dhesi's ZOO file format from 1986. It allowed for multiple generations of a given file, and archive headers marked deleted files with a flag (allowing them to be undeleted), which could be used for "whiteouts". It suffers far less from an extension mess because support for filesystem features from Unix, MS-DOS, and VMS (at least as they were in 1986) was provided in the base data strutures; including 8.3 and long filenames.
But really the basic error here is in using an off-line archive format for an on-line live filesystem mechanism. It's the wrong data structure for the job. Whereas there are right data structures, and have been for years. The history of filesystem formats development includes several cases of addressing the very things mentioned in the article, from deduplication (c.f. ZFS) through generations for deleted files (ODS for Files-11 in VMS, where ZOO got the idea from) to reproducible directory scan orders (c.f. the side-effects of using B-trees in HPFS).