Yes, and a lot of what most people have built sounds a lot like clearcase. Having some way to have both the "working set" of code from a monorepo vs. the "static non-working set" is a useful construct. The magic is making branches of the tree move between them seamlessly.

Clearcase was way ahead of it's time, the main issues there were really just cost (mostly licensing cost, and a little on how many sun servers you needed to serve it and keep state of the vobs)

Perforce was way ahead of it's time, everyone still wants a monotonically increasing changelist identifier too.