Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross covers the NeXT years extensively and in period. Highly recommended also to do some “archeological” read/research into what it was like to sell computers in the late 80’s, early 90’s
Yes, everything at CERN, at least in the 2000s, was in AFS. Fermilab was also using AFS extensively.
I remember compiling AFS from source for Scientific Linux 3.x because there was a weird bug that didn't let the machines mount AFS when they were integrated with LCG (before it was renamed to WLCG: https://wlcg.web.cern.ch/)
For a while, GNUSTEP Live CD was the best option to try and test GNUstep. Latest version is even available for Raspberry Pi: http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/
I think it’s the closest thing to that dream today.