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>So in essence, all this new API is mostly buying you is offline mode.

There's been, for a long time, local storage APIs.

This is filesystem access, which is very different.

I think adding a virtual file system to the local storage API's might be fine. One which cannot be mounted easily by non-technical users but has a viewer which allows dragging files into and out of it.

I vaguely recall something like that, a virtual file system using browser local storage. A search yields:

> BrowserFS is an in-browser file system that emulates the Node JS file system API and supports storing and retrieving files from various backends.

https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS

It supports storage backends such as: in memory, LocalStorage, IndexDB, HTTP, or the FileSystem API.

Which has policies that can be enabled to block it if necessary

Users click "accept" to make things work.

Filesystem access is going to have nefarious consequences.

That's not how policies work. Schools, organizations and even home users can enable policies to block this feature altogether as well as many others:

https://cloud.google.com/docs/chrome-enterprise/policies/

I'd like to see that ordinary user that is configuring API usage policies on their home network

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