I am probably looking at it from a too high-level perspective, but the RESTful paradigm was widely adopted in every domain and proved that you can model pretty much any concept as resources, with CRUD primitives and hyperlinks between them.
Wouldn't the same be applicable to files, processes, devices and so on?
It is. I don't think people are well familiar with what Plan 9 calls "files". They're objects or resources, which also happen to be files. REST/OOP/Actors/Plan9 are very similar systems.
And like it or not OOP shows that it's possible for one idiom to describe all the things when it's flexible enough.
Yeah, it's not such a laughable idea when you consider just how much of the dynamic behavior of a software system can be modeled as a series of messages between independent resources. This is part of why UML was so pervasive. People had spent intense amounts of energy modeling systems using messaging and interconnection, and UML gave us a uniform way of doing this.
I've got a lot of experience working in systems that model everything as a series of resources passing messages and it works very well. The entire QNX operating system right down to its POSIX support uses this underlying primitive and, while you would never see it in your own code their system-wide profiler leans on this design to make it easy to see how control flow moves between isolated threads and processes within the software system.
Wouldn't the same be applicable to files, processes, devices and so on?