I suspect Novel/IPX is still out there

Yes, and more. Check out what runs on factory floors sometime. There's stuff that speaks naked Ethernet, as in you type the MAC of the machine into the application. There's also stuff that speaks CANbus over Ethernet without IP in the middle.

Raw ethernet is nice because you can't send ethernet frames from a web browser.

Wow. Had no idea. Fascinating!

I went through training on it back in 2012 - apparently it (at least at the time, not sure about now) was dominant in the australian mining industry, so the larger tertiary education providers were requested to at least familiarise students with it.

It was a strange beast but there were a few odd spots it was better than active directory - e.g. an "Organizational Role" could be created and have a user assigned to it, so you could more easily seperate the user (john smith) from their position and the permissions that go with it (finance director). So when john smith retires it is trivial to replace the occupant of the finance director organisational role.

I've always wondered why we don't use that as our subject for all sorts of business needs. I'm talking about normal employee-to-employee business in addition to more technical things like security groups and so forth. Don't email Karen, email [whatever her role is], at least for official requests pertaining explicitly to defined job responsibilities.

That way the sender doesn't get delayed by unknown turnover, and the new recipient has full history to look back upon instead of starting cold.