Plan9 allows for implementing file servers in user space and exporting a whole file tree as a virtual "folder", so it's really more of "everything as a file server". No different than FUSE, really.

From what I've seen, Plan 9 fans turn their noses up at FUSE. They say FUSE is not "it", but don't really seem to explain what "it" is to differentiate it from FUSE.

And as Feynman said, you don't truly understand a thing until you can teach it. So that leaves us in a weird predicament where the biggest proponents of Plan 9 apparently don't understand Plan 9 well enough to teach it to the rest of us.