everyone's doing it
so-called "conventional" distributions are doing this too, just from a different direction.
if you look at a current Fedora system, /lib is a symlink to /usr/lib , /lib64 is a symlink to /usr/lib64 , /bin is a symlink to /usr/bin , and so on: this is the 'usr merge' from a while back, and other distros are doing the same, e.g. Debian in https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge .
In Fedora 42, /usr/sbin is a symlink to /usr/bin . So /sbin , /bin , /usr/sbin and /usr/bin are all the same directory.
On an F42 install, the only real directories at the top level are /boot , /dev , /etc , /home , /mnt , /opt , /proc , /run , /sys , /tmp , /usr and /var . Of those, dev, proc and sys are kernel interfaces, so really we just have boot , etc , home , mnt , opt , run , tmp , usr and var.
There are clear purposes there which I don't immediately see replicated in the gobo design. For instance, multiple levels of configuration. It's becoming increasingly common to have a clear separation between upstream/distro defaults (which are in /usr), system-wide site configuration (which is in /etc), and per-user configuration (which is under /home). This is a useful concept, and having the files in three clearly different locations makes it easy to know what's what, transfer around the things you need, and keep a clear distinction between system files (which can be immutable) and local customization (which cannot be).
there's definitely more that can be done here - it would be lovely to get rid of one out of /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 at some point, for instance. I'm not convinced we really need /opt any more, certainly not by default. But everyone's rowing in broadly the same direction.