I'm using sshfs for most of my remote filesystem needs now.
In my testing, NFS meaningfully but not substantially beat Samba in bandwidth and with much less server load (sorry I didn't keep data).
Even though using a NAS is slower than a native RAID0 of NVMe/PCIeG4 drives, it gives me shared, automatic snapshots, automatic replications, etc. It's totally worth it.
NFSv4 rules.
ADD: [1] TrueNAS SCALE was _just_ released and I'll be evaluating this seriously and expect to migrate to it.
I'm sure it's less common these days with everything on "the cloud" (far less convenient), but in the old days entire companies ran on NFS. Thousands of workstations, with dozens-to-hundreds of NFS servers mapped to a global filesystem hierarchy, automounting as needed.
So the answer to "has anyone" is yes, lots of companies, for a couple decades.
I do miss it, it was so super convenient to have everything in what seemed one giant filesystem.
At a tiny scale I still have the convenience at home. My file server (ZFS) exports various filesystems to all other machines in the house (via zfs sharenfs).