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I'd imagine having to maintain last-access time on files can be constraining for filesystem performance.

You can usually disable atime if you have performance concerns, so it's not really that big of a deal.

I'd say a clear failure of the unix legacy is that file creation time wasn't tracked. You only had atime, ctime, and mtime.

On macOS you can only access st_birthtimespec with stat(2) if the `_DARWIN_FEATURE_64_BIT_INODE` macro is defined.

A quick search shows most newer filesystems support birth or creation time:

* Btrfs: otime * ext4: crtime * UFS2: st_birthtime * ZFS: crtime

At least Linux doesn't do that by default anymore (or only down to a certain resolution). So yes, proven very wrong/short sighted.

I think Linux still requires you to set the noatime mount option to disable this.

Granted, this is done by default in every modern distro I have seen.