Yeah, I can say with some certainty that every aerospace engineer has this idea at some point then moves on to other things. A select few have pursued it but at least at aircraft scale it results in a number of other engineering challenges related to structures and resonance so it's usually abandoned. The brilliance here is applying it to an area where the aspect ratios are so low that the mechanical issues don't apply and you can just cast it out of a big chunk of solid metal.