From my experience most non-IT workers were the same pre cloud.

They just do things by rote and save everything to a single folder or their desktop - its why a lot of office workers hate change to new application or operating system versions, they don't understand how it works they have just memorized a bunch of steps to follow to get a task done.

When Chromebooks came out, Google made schools a major target for those devices. Looks like it worked.

And meanwhile, the 'directory structure' of Google docs remains one of the worst I've seen. Haven't opened a document in 6 months? Good luck finding it without using the search bar.

Why not? A doc is a file, and GDrive still has directories, or folders. Not everything is a doc, there are sheets, pdfs, pics, among others

Usually when turning in it's either a document already created in google clasroom, so you just click a button and it turns in, or it's found via the list of "recently opened documents."

I don't think she knows the difference between those document types other than she can type into one but not the others. A PDF and a read-only google text document are essentially the same thing as far as she is concerned.