Yes, the core design is building a workflow system on a database--essentially, replacing the central orchestrator most workflow systems use with a Postgres database. This previous blog post goes into more detail: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/postgres-is-all-you-need-for-durab... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313530)
I'm glad you mentioned DBOS. I personally think DB based OS or more accurately data-centric OS is the way to go to simplify all the distributed applications (I'm looking at you Kafka!).
In addition to DBOS please check the original data-centric OS proposed by the MIT team based on D4M technology. This new architecture data-centric OS similar to TabulaROSA in concept where data is managed and governed by mathematical relationship in this case associative array based D4M [1],[2].
This concept can be implemented initially on Linux without introducing a totally new OS unless you wanted to (read: VC money to burn), but it's not necessary like DBOS. This is possible now because starting kernel 7.0 Linux support generic non-conventional kernel bypass for memory, storage and compute with io_uring, eBPF and BPF Arena for examples [3].
[1] D4M:
https://d4m.mit.edu/
[2] TabulaROSA: Tabular Operating System Architecture for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous Compute Engines [PDF]:
hmhttps://web.mit.edu/ha22286/www/papers/HPEC18.pdf
[3] BPF comes to io_uring at last:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1062286/
thanks!!