Yes, it is; among a few other great cross-platform FOSS tools that are built just for backups, and they do it really well. But most of them do periodic scans (as opposed to file change trigger-based backup runs, which I guess is what you might be looking for, I assume by your second sentence).

FSEvents can be used for triggering a backup on change, but in the case of emulating their use in Time Machine, the goal is to use them to list all directories which have been changed since the last backup to avoid unnecessary rescanning.

I use restic, too, and I am very pleased with it, although I run it on windows, which works, but isn't perfect. So, you use it regularly?