Yes, there are efforts in this area. I started a first-principles database kernel design 4-5 years ago which has a couple different licensees and implementations, and should be showing up in a broad platform relatively soon. In open source, ScyllaDB is a credible implementation that goes half-way to addressing this (as an intentional reimplementation of Cassandra, it inherits some of the old style architectural features of Cassandra for better and worse). I am aware of a few other efforts at tech companies but in my opinion these are a mixed bag because they are borrowing too heavily from existing classic architectures for the sake of expediency to fully realize the benefits.

The archetypical differentiating features, relative to classic designs, of these future-looking (for lack of a better term) kernel designs is the prodigious exploitation of user space I/O, dearth of multithreaded synchronization, and the paucity of classic tree-like data structures (not necessarily hash tables, just not trees). The industry will get here eventually, some emerging tech sectors absolutely require it for their data models.