For what it's worth, .NET Core has the same capabilities of abstracting away pathname separators, if one wants it. Personally, I don't regard such things as useless and unneeded; because I see the value in not writing programs that break what has been a well-known piece of computer lore for 4 decades: namely that one can be Unix-like to a degree on non-Unix platforms such as MS-DOS, DOS+Windows, OS/2, and Windows NT.

The Path api will choose the right separator for you. Thinking about it really is a non-concern nowadays.

Yeah, usually I don't bother with manually inserting separators and instead use Path.join or whatever else. It'll do the right thing on basically all platforms.

They still have a point, though. There are virtually no platforms that don’t support forward slashes, yet there are abstractions in place to avoid simply using slashes. This may be irrelevant, but it’s still a useless layer of complexity.

I generally don't like to treat paths as strings just like I don't like to treat pointers as memory addresses. But hey, you don't always have to care about that stuff to make a functioning piece of software. You know, pick your battles, or however the saying goes.

(Not intended to be sarcastic, just in case it comes off that way. I only add the "useless layer of complexity" because it makes the intention more explicit for me.)

It is not a useless layer of complexity. Encapsulating paths in an object isn’t purely about slashes.