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.
Most people don't need a file to be in two places at once, it's more confusing than convenient. And if they do want two of a file at all, they almost certainly want them to be separate copies so that the original stays unmodified when they edit the second one. Anyone who really wants a hard link is probably comfortable with the command line, or should get comfortable.
The Mac actually kind of gets the best of both worlds, APFS can clone a file such that they aren't hard links but still share the same blocks of data on disk, so the second file takes up no more space, and it's only when a block gets edited that it diverges from the other one and takes up more space, while the unmodified blocks remain shared. It happens when copy-pasting or duplicating a file in the Finder as well as with
cpon the command line. I'm sure other modern file systems have this as well.