> If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

If that's what you were doing, you won't get affected by this. This is about files/folders that were "hardlinked", which was difficult to do by accident. I think you had to hold Ctrl while dragging the file into another folder, or something like that. (The key to notice is that they're talking about one file being in multiple directories, not multiple files with identical contents.)

>If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

That's precisely the behavior you'll get. You were allowed in the previous implementation to upload a file to one location and then put it in 2 locations, such that you would have changes in either location reflected the same way. This wasn't 'copying' a file, it was multiparenting it.

This is a concern of presentation, not the backing implementation: How to present (approximately) hardlinked files to users, with the possible complications of varying support for hard and soft links or other mechanisms across the various client implementations of Google Drive.

There's advantages and disadvantages to using either.

I see. I don't use Drive via the web/app interfaces much but essentially, hard links are a thing already and users must've inadvertently created them anyway when doing actions via web/app.

Any idea if these hard links can be created with Drive clients on Mac/Win?

They can't. The data model in Drive will no longer support hardlinking, period.

Precisely. I can understand if they want to change the wording on their interfaces going forward to promote folks to use "shortcuts" but it sounds awful if they're going to do this to existing files/directories.