The only thing SPDK buys you is somewhat lower latency, which isn't that important for most applications because modern high-performance I/O schedulers usually are not that latency sensitive anyway.

The downside of SPDK is that it is unreasonably painful to use in most contexts. When it was introduced there were few options for doing high-performance storage I/O but a lot has changed since then. I know many people that have tested SPDK in storage engines, myself included, but none that decided the juice was worth the squeeze.

Depending on the IOPS rate for your app; SPDK can result in less CPU time spent in issuing IO/reaping completions compared to ex. io_uring.

See Ex. https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p2090-haas.pdf What Modern NVMe Storage Can Do, And How To Exploit It: High-Performance I/O for High-Performance Storage Engines

for actual data on this.

OFC, If your block size is large enough and/or your design is batching enough etc. that you already don't spend much time in issuing IO/reaping completion then as you say, SPDK will not provide much of a gain.

I believe seastar uses it and that is the base of scylladb storage engine: https://seastar.io/

I believe the next generation ceph OSD is built on seastar as well: https://docs.ceph.com/en/reef/dev/crimson/crimson/

With something like ceph, latency is everything as writes need to be synchronously committed to each OSD replica before the writing client is unblocked. I think for ceph they are trying to move to nvme-of to basically bypass the OS for remote NVME access. Im not sure how this will work security wise however as you cannot just have any node on the network reading and writing random blocks of nvme-of devices.