Initially packfiles were absolutely about filesystem overhead, "a lot of small files" were terrible performance-wise. OSes got better tho, don't know in windows side, but on linux side "few tens of thousands of small files" case really isn't that bad
But I'm really talking about ability to just directly load an asse via reading a blob of data vs having to munge it thru SQLite code. Or even just mmap'ing data directly
Windows is still extremely painful with many small files (at last the Win32 API, maybe going directly via Nt* functions is slightly better) and it only gets worse once you add "Antivirus" Malware that wants to hook into all FS access.
But I'm really talking about ability to just directly load an asse via reading a blob of data vs having to munge it thru SQLite code. Or even just mmap'ing data directly