The most "research" thing I'm aware of 9front (since you're speaking in present tense) doing is that GEFS needed to work out a lot of things for itself that weren't in the Bε-tree proof-of-concept FS that came before.
I dunno how "close to the metal" you'd consider that.
("GEFS" being a disk filesystem that's been discussed on HN.)
"Plan 9 praisers who don't actually use Plan 9" have a tendentious way of speaking, that's actually a lot like "AI slop", that Plan 9 users can instantly recognise. Telltale signs include speaking about Plan 9 in the past tense, and a belief that with Plan 9 you can somehow just strap all your computers together to get more performance or something. Because "you have 9P".
Scwm had animations, which went in sometime before the ~2001 Usenix paper, due to a need for them. I don't think there's anything out of place about needful animations.
1. You can't pick and choose your monitor like this on laptops.
2. I like my "window/s of interest" (the current "task") to be front and centre; I would like my window management when task switching both to do this for me and to set the previous current task aside for me. It seems to me this would require some kind of undiscovered paradigm that isn't tiling or stacking. Ultrawide is just forcing me to direct my attention to a specific off-centre region for extended periods. This feels like holding breath, except psychological - I can only take it so long, then my eyes, by themselves, are going to look at other areas, whether I like it or not. Which is also one reason why tiling is an absolute non-starter for me.
So rc was made for Plan 9. The examples in that paper are definitely on tenth edition Unix, I think this would be because
A fairly complete version of Plan 9 was built in 1987 and 1988, but development was abandoned. In May of 1989 work was begun on a completely new system
I've been seeing people, never ones who were actually there, make this claim in the last five to ten years. Rc was on tenth edition Unix. I've seen no evidence that it originated on Unix. The manual calls it the Plan 9 shell.
I dunno how "close to the metal" you'd consider that.
("GEFS" being a disk filesystem that's been discussed on HN.)