is there a conventional name for this format

<SCNR>Does "workaround for crappy design where filesystem developers don't put metadata into a proper database" work?</SCNR>

Honestly, while modern filesystems are astonishingly good at not randomly loosing your data(*), that metadata-in-randomly-located-chained-blocks design just doesn't scale all that well.

Depending on your operating system as well as file system layout, you could gain a sizeable speed boost by turning off access time logging. On Linux, this would usually be accomplished by adding a "noatime" option in /etc/fstab. This prevent write operations every time you open a directory or file for reading.

(*) Astonishingly good: Yes. Perfect: No. In modern systems, often enough the culprit of data loss is some random bitflips im RAM.