VMS is widely maligned today, but it really wasn't bad, and as you note the clever, native support of versions was kind of amazing. I can't believe that's not part of a modern OS.
VMS' clustering tech was also pretty great, which is the reason my late-90s employer was still on it (though on Alpha hardware at that point, not Vax).
Even in the late 90s, you'd get a lot of pushback on "VMS really wasn't bad". One manager I knew believed that the built-in versioning existed solely for DEC to sell people extra disks. I personally can easily believe that filesystems with version numbers don't exist anymore. I'm going to have to reference "The Hideous Name", Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike85hideous.pdf
VMS' clustering tech was also pretty great, which is the reason my late-90s employer was still on it (though on Alpha hardware at that point, not Vax).