And io_uring itself was more directly inspired by NVMe and RDMA, which of course work with these same queues as GFX cards. The original io_uring patch compares itself to SPDK, whose premise is "what if we expose an abstraction for a hardware queue per thread to an application " - basically the same programming model as io_uring. And SPDK was just taking techniques from networking (DPDK) and applying them to storage.

source - I helped create SPDK.