Can someone explain how this could benefit system design or from the viewpoint of a programmer?
Plan9 / Inferno were also design descendants of System V Streams.
My two cents is that composing applications at the FS level is more expressive than Files/Sockets/HTTP requests.
Gluing up different of pieces of software becomes easier as most of the time it becomes just a matter of mounting a filesystem and you don’t need to worry about it being provided by a local or remote process.