It's funny how we've come back around to this, with the M3 Mac Studios allowing you to enable RDMA over Thunderbolt. You have to toggle the setting via a firmware change, but it's there for performance!

FireWire was pretty wild in its day. It just got hampered by the per-port licensing fee, and once USB 2.0 rolled out, its days were numbered for anyone not needing the latency/power features.