I often grumble at the lack of usability of the directory hierarchy. Even though I grew up with directories and the FHS. To often I know what file I want but have to navigate an entire filesystem. This is especially true for non native open source Linux tools on macOS. They don't use the native file browser (which is not without its faults either) and often force you to start from root instead of a logical place like your home.

There is really no use to have all files and folders on your fs available for opening or saving in most apps. Often you just need the most recent modified file or only files of a certain type. And there are really not a lot of places it makes sense to save files to outside of your home folder and personal project layout.

> But files, directories and paths are just abstractions we use for convenience

Abstractions common to literally every home computer operating system from the last several decades.

And absent from (or at least heavily obfuscated on) the mobiles and tablets young students use as their primary computing devices.

Except games consoles. And tablets. And phones. And quite a lot of online services..

Phones have files and directories and there are several apps targeting normal audiences.

In other words, "that's how we've always done it". Is the justification for continuing to do it that way when the very foundation of that is based on outdated abstractions? As mentioned, there's no tangible reason for using directories and files as organizations except that we're fitting modern paradigms into existing ones. We're retro-fitting them to a system that existed because of technical limitations that don't exist now, for some reason.

Ted Nelson used to refer to it as "the tyranny of the file".

But he didn't really offer an alternative (other than Xanadu). And a hierarchical system of storage is convenient for lots of people - once they understand what "hierarchy" means.

I think understanding hierarchy is one of those epiphanies that a new computer user can sometimes have. Others simply don't seem to be able to grok it.

I've always found WinFS[1] to be a pretty interesting attempt at a relational filesystem. Although it was probably a bit too ambitious, which led to it being cancelled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS