They already did: https://www.commanderx16.com/
you just probably want something better.
and that is the problem building higher performance requires more advanced lithography and that is expensive and until recently was not even an option for a hobbyist (without taking a mortgage on their house).
Given current stagnation, you need only wait about 10 years for that viable option.
rxvt-unicode with tabbedex.
I refuse to use a terminal emulator that needs more than 100MB of RAM to display 80x24 green text on a black display
checksums at the filesystem level does nothing to protect against memory corruption which can overwrite everything on your disk with null values and a matching checksum; fail to write anything to disk and/or do nothing.
But that is the gamble you take every day with every GB of RAM you have.
the correct answer is Gemini or gopher.
No ECC, absolutely worthless for a NAS if you care about your data.
That is just the gateway drug to bootstrapping.
Check out https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap
if you want the real hard stuff.