I feel like I have so many problems with this. Like, look, I have some huge projects in Adobe Illustrator and they are quite deliberately spread out among a ton of files because anything over a certain size is just asking for working on it to become super-slow, and for some obscure edge case to completely trash the file.

I'm skimming the PDF of his slides and I'm just seeing a long list of quirky environments that have continued to be dead-ends. Maybe he talks about how this would actually work with huge power tools if I watch the talk, maybe he grapples with issues like "programs crash" and "iterative backups are good". Maybe he even deals with things like "files are a metaphor based in the physical world and perhaps the reason we keep on coming back to them is because they provide a good way to say that this particular piece of information is over here". I dunno, I'm not seeing suggestions of anything that makes me want to invest the time in listening to the talk.

I wish him the best of luck, maybe he will be the one to finally find a way out of the world of files to something so clearly better that it's worth dealing with the raw edges of it only being a few years old vs a modern GUI atop a filesystem, but I sure ain't gonna hold my breath.