It's basically still the only game in town for a high performance shared posix filesystem with multiple writers and builtin support in basically all operating systems.

As an application developer, I probably wouldn't choose to design a system that needed it.

However there are lots of good reasons why a company in 2023 might decide to use this NFS based product: https://cloud.google.com/filestore?hl=en

The NFS 4.2 spec was released late 2016. Whats your newfangled alternative? Some cloud service (other guys computer) that runs a bunch of actual tech (like NFS) behind the scenes?

Beneath the layers of containers, rest-api's, js frameworks and web interfaces, there's someone that makes use of serious stuff.

I use FreeBSD as fileserver, serving NFS to linux clients.

What do you suggest as an alternative? SMB/CIFS was -- when I last looked, which was a while back -- much slower for this use case.

Yes, there isn’t a saner alternative for centralised POsIX file storage to be accessed by hundreds of servers. This is HPC world.

Small services, and object file storage can get away with other solutions.

NFS scales and operates incredibly well however it has constraints.

Like any tool, it has its appropriate uses.

Why would you exclude a useful tool from your arsenal because of perceived downsides that are easy to hide from the layer above with appropriate system design?

Surely you jest! There's a ton of legacy workloads that rely on NFS.