The irony is that anyone using IDEs is using the same idea, as all of them use a virtual filesystem layer to simulate the same capabilities as the image approach.
Edit: rather than just naysaying, it occurred to me to reference the notion of Orthogonal Persistence, which the image-based approach provides (not without drawbacks) but IDEs typically don’t. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39615228