Indeed! After, a distributed database made for financial systems, that could prevent double spending, provide immutability of the data, includes a mechanism of authentication, with some voting power distributed between a quorum of financial of institutions... it's actually exactly what Reth is.

To have deployed some blockchain layer 1 nodes, it's actually quite similar than deploying a distributed database.

Nowadays, it's actually just easier to fork geth/reth or other engine, and just deploy it. There are so many doc and tooling that can then be reused.