It's Linux style. Syscalls are last resort - they're low level and have to be maintained forever. Instead, there are more robust and purpose specific abstractions built on top of them:

- ioctls on char/blkdevs for either physical or logical devices (which also allow for a 'handle' paradigm of operation, and for event polling via epoll/select)

- sysfs and procfs entries for system and process tunables and data

- debugfs for day to day debugging (which is explicitely unstable and not enabled in most production kernels)

- prctl, fcntl, ...

In addition, all of the above is 'automatically' ported across architectures. Some Linux architecture ports have their own syscall tables (with own numbering) and need to be explicitly modified any time a syscall is added.

It it's not the file paradigm, it has to be system calls (plenty of them) set in stone, which could quickly turn into a problem or you probably mean a wrapper library?