Interestingly, Stack Overflow is using several of those tricks to speed up their internal services, as the kernel-side HTTP server is made available to everyone, it's not locked to MS applications. AFAIK they have few "microservices" which don't use IIS but handle HTTP through HTTP.sys

SQL Server has huge amounts of tuning and cooperation with NTFS driver team to ensure good performance, and frankly, it's at the high-end of the databases, and I really wouldn't mind using it except for price :(