am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.
I can't say I disagree, but I am ignorant of what the alternatives would be. A tagged database of files so you can query by tag, filename, or such?
You have to think in 'information dimensionality'. A yes/no toggle is 0D, a list is 1D, a list of lists (std hierarchy) are 2D, a list of list of list are 3D etc. All information storage types are one of these dimensions. Think of a graph-base file system with nodes and edges between everything. Now, imagine a filesystem where you flick a switch and the whole structure shows another pov ? Maybe you want the whole thing to be shown as file-type hiearchy, or only parts of it. Maybe you need to show movement in the structure, so everything are in a temporal/spatial hierarchy, maybe you are only interested in dependencies ? Relations ? Other 'weird' metrics ? ..and so on. The main problem is to manage, find and show the needed information in a higher-dimentional fs.
Technically a normal file is also a list, or another ordered structure, but in this sense, they are just a node with further dimensionality.
There's a TON of information layers locked away in our normal filesystem hierarchy, so OP are perfectly right, and people here have no imagination or even a world model of information structures..
A hierarchical tag structure would let you mimic a folder structure, but free you from many of its constraints
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders