It hasn't been necessary to drill down the applications in the start menu since windows 7. Just start, type search, enter. Then pin your frequent apps to the task bar.

Not necessary, but I'd argue it was still the predominant method for 7 and even 8 (from what I've seen people use, anyway). I do find myself personally with 10 using search a lot more (haven't had to observe others, so no idea about others usage), but sometimes I've had to shift over to the Win10 equivalent of the start menu -> applications method if I can't remember the name of the application outright (this was a bigger problem for me prior to Curse becoming part of Twitch, admittedly. They had two different clients and one of them was a bit more vague in naming).

I was more alluding to the gnome method which last I used it has a similar menu with the tiered folder structure. Maybe they have added search as well, but my memory of GNOME is too fuzzy so I had to go with the fresher (for me) Windows equivalent (granted, with Windows 10 the applications folder essentially hangs out to the left of the Windows 8 start screen-esque area so calling it Applications folder would be a misnomer on my part).