That certainly would address part of it. However, the other part is about the integrity of the file properties / metadata itself, which is a concern I believe others have raised in the context of moving their vault folders between file systems, resulting in the system changing the metadata.
What I’m proposing would, I think, prevent that issue from arising as Obsidian would retain file metadata within the vault itself, with each note having a corresponding metadata file that only Obsidian reads and writes to.
From the user’s point of view, nothing would really change, but they’d have the additional benefit of being able to call that metadata into a note if they for some reason required it. And if they did require it, they could be confident that, when moving their vault, the metadata being called upon won’t change because Obsidian isn’t relying on the file system when setting those values; it’s relying on the corresponding metadata file within the vault.
I’m not a developer, so I have no idea of what the costs / benefits would be to doing things this way. Maybe it would add too much bloat to a vault as there are suddenly twice as many files (one for each note), and even if the metadata files are small in size, hidden, and only Obsidian has read/write access, maybe the possibility of a user accidentally un-hiding them and editing the contents to break things in unforeseen ways would render the whole proposal untenable. I don’t know. But I’m hoping something can be done to create a clearer separation between properties / metadata that are entirely content-focused and ones that are really just about the file itself.