also, worst case you can do this with link features? Which is basically every system under the sun.

but link is dangerous, as a edit made to one file will then be made to all copies.

For example, If I have two files /home/m/todo.txt and /home/m/backup2025/todo.txt that are identical and you then replace /home/m/todo.txt with a link to /home/m/backup2025/todo.txt and I later edit /home/m/todo.txt then backup copy would also be updated. With apfs clones the backup would not be modified when I updated the file.