Damn, that's handy. I now wonder how much trouble making a CSI driver that does this would be for backporting to the 1.2x clusters (since I don't think that kubernetes does backports for anything)

Not too hard. If you happen to be on CRI-O this has been implemented for a bit but if you are like us and on containerd then you need the new 2.1 beta release. That does most of the heavy lifting, implementing a CSI driver that mounted these as PVs wouldn't be super hard I don't think and you could borrow liberally from the volume source implementation.