Very doubtful that it would work, but out of all the weird, crazy, and creative stories generated from World War 2, I wouldn’t put it totally outside of any plausibility.

Though I had a negative experience on my last go of it, and a “root”-based filesystem still confuses me, this was one of the big solid advantages last time I checked a few distros. I followed some advice of putting the system-level directories on one partition, and my user content on a different one. When I got fed up with one distribution, I cleaned and reinstalled things onto the system-level partition, leaving the user directory alone; I just had to inform it where those directory mappings would go.

Even though I was aware of it, this was one of my challenges. I was using Bazzite, which is obviously so niche that few tutorials would be specific. So, I tried to understand which distro was the base layer for it, and based my searches around that. Even then, a lot of things felt inapplicable, or needed to go through its containerized compatibility structure.