They’re wonderful for low volume, low performance and low reliability operations. (browsing, copying, integrating with legacy systems that do not permit native access), but beyond that they consume huge resources and do odd things when the backend is not in its most ideal state.
Honestly, I'd give FUSE a second chance, you'd be surprised at how useful it can be -- after all, it's literally running in userland so you don't need to do anything funky with privileges. However, if I starting afresh on a similar project I'd probably be looking at using 9p2000.L instead.
I commented though because GCP highlights it in a few places as component for AI workloads. I'm curious if anyone is using it in an important application and happy with it.
Fair, but far from a common advice I’m willing to tell people (other CTOs) to do.