Note that Joyent ended up proposing patches to fix their performance problem (and got them committed). Maybe it would be useful for Tiemen to try that code? (That commit cherry-picks cleanly on REL_11_STABLE.)
Unfortunately it doesn't compile:
access/transam/xlog.o: In function `XLogFileInit': /home/ter/rpmbuild/BUILD/postgresql-11.3/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c:3299: undefined reference to `pg_pwrite'